Again, Ambergris

"That is bad news, very bad news," gravely remarked Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy in Manhattan one day last week. He referred to reports that at Islesboro, Me. an 11-year-old boy had found a 17-lb. lump of ambergris worth some $15,000.

Dr. Cushman. curator of the American Museum of Natural History and an expert on ambergris, explained: "I mean that is bad news for me. It means another barrage of letters from every Tom, Dick & Harry who finds a hunk of rotten fish anywhere along the Atlantic Coast." Last big U. S. find of "ambergris" was by poverty-stricken residents of Bolinas Beach, Calif. (TIME, March 19). Their treasure proved valueless. So do most of the substances--usually soap, wax, paint, tallow, mud, wood, coke, clinkers, decayed fish--with which wild-eyed people rush to chemical laboratories to learn whether they have found the sperm whale secretion which is used as a base for expensive perfumes. No such delusion had small, apple-cheeked Roderick Palmer Crandall when he found a chunk of waxy, yellowish stuff near his grandfather's home at Islesboro. To him it was just something which bobbed up with a satisfying swoosh when he pushed it under water. Soon the shorewise eye of Roderick's carpenter-father Hezekiah fell upon it. He sent specimens off to several chemists. Last week he announced that the chemists, whose names he would not tell, had reported his son's find to be pure ambergris. He further declared that a Midwest oil company had offered him $4,380 for five pounds of the stuff. Almost beside himself at that news was a neighboring fisherman who had found a 50-lb. chunk which looked just like Roderick's.

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