British Association Meet

The 101st meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science got under way at York, England last week with Sir Alfred Ewing, longtime (1916-29) principal of the University of Edinburgh, presiding. Sir Alfred at 77 is one of Britain's great engineers. He attended his first British Association meeting when he was 12, wearing kilts. His recollection covers many "surprises that are common-places today: the dynamo, electric motor, transformer, rectifier, storage battery, incandescent lamp,* phonograph, telephone, internal combustion engine, aircraft, steam turbine, . . . wireless telegraphy, thermionic valve as receiver, as amplifier, as generator of electric waves . . . for broadcasting.

''Whither does this tremendous procession tend?" he asked last week in his presidential address. "Man was ethically unprepared for so great a bounty. In the slow evolution of morals he is still unfit for the tremendous responsibility it entails. The command of Nature has been put into his hands before he knows how to command himself. . . . So man finds this, that while he is enriched with a multitude of possessions and possibilities beyond his dreams, he is in great measure deprived of one inestimable blessing, the necessity of toil. . . . Where shall we look for a remedy? I cannot tell."

Aristocracy of Eudemons. With a remedy for Sir Alfred's puzzle and many indignant words about the necessity for such a remedy came Professor Miles Walker of the University of Manchester, onetime British Westinghouse electrical engineer. He would have all communities, nations, peoples methodically coordinated and controlled by boards of Eudemons (Great Engineers), who would see--as Aristotle advised--that every human led a happy life of action regulated by reason. Every inhabitant would do his proper share of work (the Soviet intention). For proof that Society could thus be run he suggested that Parliament should "found an experimental, voluntary, selfsupporting colony . . . of say 100,000 persons to maintain themselves and continually to increase their wealth when freed from the restraints and social errors of modern civilization." As a site for the experiment he suggested "one of the States of North America," or France.

Light-Twisted Life. Most people are righthanded. Certain sugars are also "right-handed", in that they twist a beam of polarized light to the right. Maybe, suggested Dr. William Hobson Mills of Cambridge, the dexterity of chemicals and people have a common base. To experiment he projected beams of light through inert solutions. Some of the light was twisted to the right, some to the left. Right turns predominated slightly. This may account for the fact that all living things are essentially dissymmetrical, more right-handed than lefthanded.

Lord & Fleas. The late Nathaniel Charles Rothschild collected and classified fleas. His brother Lionel Walter Rothschild Lord Rothschild collects and classifies birds and butterflies, is a much respected zoological systematise Lord Rothschild last week maintained the concept of "flexible species", that "individuals are never alike whatever their relationship to each other." For example he cited the commonest British mouse-flea (Ctenophthalmus agyrtes). "A calculation . . . to find among them two absolutely alike in the number and position of the bristles on the body arrives at the amusing figure of many million billions, a figure certainly in excess of that of the whole flea-population of Great Britain, and tantamount to proving that there are no two specimens alike."

Long-headed cat-fleas, he revealed, traveled into Europe on Egyptian cats. In Europe they encountered short-headed dog-fleas on dogs and wolves. Now cat-fleas and dog-fleas live together on either cats or dogs, but do not interbreed.

*Fifty years ago last week the late Thomas Alva Edison started the first generation of the first central station system in the world. The current lit 400 lamps in Manhattan's financial district.

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