Facts, Questions

Four learned societies met in the East last fortnight, explained and evaluated their work:

What Is Going to Happen Next? Physics is like "a mother who has just given birth to several healthy children, but has not yet recovered sufficiently to know what is going to happen next." -- Charles Galton Darwin (Edinburgh U.), mathematician grandson of the Charles Darwin.

Too Much Promise? Arthur Holly Compton (U. of Chicago) asked: "Is a girl smoking and listening to jazz from a loud speaker what the great electrical pioneers have been working for. ... Is our science any more likely to last than the science of the ancient Greeks? Democritus thought he had solved the problem as to what, the world is made of and how. Yet around his atoms was staged the first great fight between science and philosophy. And Socrates and Plato, the opponents of science, won that fight. Greek science failed, though the civilization based upon it survived. Was this not because science started out by promising to help men to live better, and did not succeed?"

Diluted 6 Boiled Brains, Brain cells contain protein of about the consistency of uncooked egg white. Alcohol, coffee, cocaine and anesthetics coagulate those brain proteins, as boiling hardens eggs. Bromides and thiocyanates thin out the proteins. In certain types of insanity (the manias) the brain apparently becomes permanently boiled. In other types (catatonia) the brain is diluted. Using drugs which give the opposite effect helps the various insane types, and sometimes cures. Lack of oxygen lets the brain get soft. Hence, said Wilder Dwight Bancroft (Cornell) who with his colleague G. Holmes Richter made these observations: "Aviators may become incapacitated temporarily when flying at high altitudes. There is a height for each aviator above which it is not safe for him to go, as he may develop mental confusion, leading to errors of performance, sometimes hallucinations of sight and hearing and in some cases an uncontrollable desire to sing and whistle. This last is rather an anticlimax."

Rattling Ships-- The decks and super structures of such mighty ships as the Majestic and Leviathan rip slightly during heavy storms. William Hovgaard (Mass. Institute of Technology) advised marine engineers, who must figure tearing stress of storms, to use more rivets on their ships and to strengthen the corners of deck houses.

Sun Compounds. Temperature of the sun (12,000DEG F. on the surface, perhaps millions within) is so great that it was believed that elements could not exist there in molecules or compounds, only as free atoms. Henry Norris Russell (Princeton) reported spectographic discovery of seven solar compounds of hydrogen, four of oxygen, and three of other elements. Sun compounds are not stable as earth's. On earth an oxygen atom holds two hydrogen atoms and makes a molecule. On the sun the oxygen holds only one hydrogen atom, and they are ever ready to sunder.

Lined Earth, The U. S. Coast & Geodetic Survey has thrown base survey lines across the U. S. and is now proceeding through Alaska. The lines contact those of Canada and Mexico. They are accurate to one part in a million. Last year two Russians visited William Bowie of the Survey for instructions on throwing 30.000 miles of base lines across the U. S. S. R. to Behring Strait, where they will touch the Alaska lines. The work will be done in five years. Then the exact contour of two-thirds of the earth will be known and the suburban home owner may figure almost precisely how far his plot is from the railroad station and the North Star.

Dwindling 10,000. Like the anabasis of Xenophon's 10,000 Greek mercenaries (hired by Persia's Cyrus II to fight his brother Artaxerxes), Alaska's famed Valley of 10,000 Smokes (created by Mt. Katmai blowing off its top) has dwindled to about 100 steaming earth vents.-- Robert Fiske Griggs (George Washington U.).

Women. For some reason scientists do not like women in their deliberations or public shows. The American Philosophical Society, which is tycoonish and social as well as scientific, this year elected among 25 new members Walter Sherman Gifford, Frank Billings Kellogg, Dwight Whitney Morrow, Adolph Simon Ochs, John Davison Rockefeller Jr. But no women. Last woman admitted was Agnes Repplier, 73, author and Laetare Medalist, in 1928. Before her was Annie Jump Cannon, 67, Harvard's patient star recorder, in 1925.

The National Academy of Science, whose membership means professional eminence, had until last week only one woman member--Florence Rena Sabin, 59, important anatomist who is now doing fundamental research on tuberculosis at the Rockefeller Institute. She became an Academician in 1925.

Last week the Academy gave Miss Sabin a companion of her own age and quality, Margaret Floy Washburn.-- In 1908 Miss Washburn published her first book, The Animal Mind and simultaneously became professor of psychology at Vassar, where she had been an associate for five years. For a term she was president of the American Psychological Association, and for another, vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Miss Sabin can match her there, having been one-term vice president and two-term president of the American Association of Anatomists.

Professor Washburn's great and good friend at Vassar was Felix, the Greek Department's old black cat. Felix knew all the stunts of the psychological laboratory and he helped out in a friendly way. He and she, she would half-seriously say, knew what each was thinking. Once Felix had nothing to say. That was when Professor Washburn co-starred with President Henry Noble MacCracken in the Vassar faculty play.

Fracas. As much as scientific men dislike women do they like intellectual fracases. And at the Academy of Science they had a lively one. President John Campbell Merriam of the Carnegie Institution, a paleontologist, argued for ten minutes that man has not, as some students believe, reached the heights of his physical and mental evolution. He can guide his future development by applying the principles of genetics.

President Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, also a paleontologist, was to talk next for 15 minutes on his hypothesis that the organs of an animal have their own struggle for existence. That is why animals of the same general family have different characteristics. Example: the shovel tusked mastodon developed its lower jaw to scoop food from swamps. The African elephant developed its upper tusks to uproot trees for their tender top leaves. This Osborn theory opposes the Darwinian theory that new types develop from accidental variations of which only those survive which are best adapted to their environment; the Lamarckian theory that new types inherit the changed habits of ancestors; the "vitalistic" theory that a force for change occurs within the germ cells.

President Osborn, however, delayed presenting his theory, to challenge President Merriam. Said he: "In pure races, such as the Swedes, evolution is undoubtedly going on at the regular rate. But we are a hybrid race. ... I think it is very doubtful that under present conditions of civilization large, mixed communities such as ours are evolving. . . . Hybrid animals cease to evolve. . . . Members of the mouse family ceased evolving at least 1.000,000 years ago."

As President Osborn sat down, Curator Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced hurdlitchka) of the U. S. National Museum, an anthropologist, rose to rebut: "There is endless chance for further evolution and it is going on. To assume that the evolution of man is ended blocks every road to the future. . . . There is that [Biblical] belief that man was created and not evolved. Sometimes it is subconscious. But it has its effect."

Ambitions Excited. Had President Osborn desired, he might have shunted this discussion aside and set his colleagues' ambitions galloping. Waiting in Manhattan was his veiled announcement that on Jan. i, 1933 he would resign the presidency of the American Museum of Natural History. He will have been president 25 years, an official 42. The way he told of his retiring was to conclude his annual report with the hope that by that date the third generation of museum trustees, whose remaining lifetime "may be estimated at 20 years . . . will be able to step into the boots of the president."

Maecenases. The late John Pierpont Morgan was a first generation trustee. The present John Pierpont Morgan is a second generation. His son Junius Spencer Morgan Jr., already cooperating with President Osborn on the Museum Endowment Committee, is obviously of the museum's third generation.

Exhortation. Before President Osborn leaves, he wants to raise $7,500,000 and thus give the museum the $22,500,000 endowment it needs. And just as heartily he wants able young men to work for and with the museum. His appeal was an exhortation:

"The sterling men of [that] first generation were impelled by the strong religious and stern Puritanical code of their time which demanded that each should give a tithe of his income to benevolent purposes and a greater or less quota of his time to the public interest. Philanthropic and patriotic service was instilled weekly in every pulpit, for practically everyone attended church.

"All this is changed, and the third or present generation must be roused by the spirit of patriotism, the sense of public service, the love of adventure on land and sea, such as was so superbly manifested during the World War and proved that young America, like young England, is sound in heart and mind and only waits the great opportunity which seems really worth great personal sacrifice.

"Such opportunity the American Museum, on its 62nd birthday, offers in unparalleled measure--travel, exploration, research, adventure, laboratory or book work, but always work of the hardest kind. Only those on the inside can form the faintest idea of what 'Life's fighting line' in the American Museum means. First, it means keeping yourself in sound physical and mental condition which is impossible if you yield to dissipation; second, it means dogged persistence in the face of what appear to be insuperable difficulties; third, it means that you must deny yourself many of the thousand opportunities which surround you in a rich and pleasure-loving age such as ours. . . .

"Two years ago the life of the banker seemed entrancing, but what New York banker today would not be glad to exchange places with the explorers and naturalists of our museum? . . ."

*Other academicians elected last week: Doctors Henry Bryant Bigelow, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Mass.; Edwin Broun Fred, University of Wisconsin; Edwin Crawford Kemble, Harvard: Adolph Knopf, Yale; Robert Harry Lowie, University of California; Joseph Haines Moore, Lick Observatory; Robert Lee Moore, Austin, Texas; Herman Joseph Muller, University of Texas, and George Linius Streeter, Carnegie Institution, Baltimore. Xew president: William Wallace Campbell, 69. president of the University of California, director of the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton.

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