Geographer

First president of Johns Hopkins university was a geographer. His name was Daniel Coit Oilman and during his 25-year term he made Johns Hopkins' graduate departments a yardstick for every university in the land. Last week Johns Hopkins' trustees elected a fifth president. He, too, is a geographer, His name is Isaiah Bowman.

Trustee Newton Diehl Baker, who proposed Dr. Bowman, knew him after the War as the chief territorial specialist of Woodrow Wilson's Peace Commission. Trustee Walter Sherman Gifford (A. T. & T.) had been his classmate at Harvard. The trustees were looking for a young man. Dr. Bowman was 56, but he had the looks of 46, the energy of 36.

Born in small Waterloo, Ont. and raised in Michigan, Isaiah Bowman got a B. S. at Harvard in three years, a Ph. D. at Yale in three more. Every few years after that he was off to South America, teaching at Yale between expeditions. In 1915 the American Geographical Society called him to Manhattan as its director. The yarn-swappers of the Explorers' Club came to know him as a vigorous organizer who raised $350,000 to finish a large-scale map of Hispanic America. In 1931 he was elected president of the International Geographical Union.

In a Harvard class report Dr. Bowman wrote: "The older I get the less I say." His tireless mind, which gets "diversion" in an intensive study of foreign affairs, is all but impossible to change, once it is made up. Subordinates and students must toe the line sharply.

Some time next spring Dr. Bowman will quit his home in Yonkers, N. Y., move to Baltimore. There, on July 1, he will take over the reins of Johns Hopkins from Joseph Sweetman Ames who is retiring at the age of 70.

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