Eskimos, Sheep, Termites

The beard of Otto Tulyevich Schmidt became the most famed in all Russia, and his fame the most glamorous when he and his party of 101 were airplane-rescued from the ice-sunk Chelyuskin (TIME, April 13, 1934). Subsequently he almost died of pneumonia. Last week, hale & hearty, this editor of the Soviet Encyclopedia and Chief of the Great Northern Sea Route Administration was back in Leningrad after an air tour of Polar settlements. The ecstasy he offered to eager Communists this time was an elaborate scheme for civilizing their blubber-munching Eskimos.

Great Northern Sea Route Administrator Schmidt will lure the little slant-eyed brothers out of their igloos, clap them into modern houses. The Schmidt settlements will have bathrooms with hot & cold running water, bakeries with bread popping in & out of ovens on conveyers, a radio network pouring out music and propaganda, libraries. "It is impossible," said the Professor, "to convince them of the advantages of settling down at fur-trading posts so long as there are no bathhouses. . . ."

The plan includes extensive planting of frost-resisting crops of the sort developed by the late Ivan Michurin, the Burbank of Russia. A start has already been made with tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce grown under glass at Khibina, inside the Arctic Circle, and with potatoes and cabbage that ripen outdoors in the wan, fleeting summer.

P:Back at stodgy U. S. desks last week were Harry Snyder, wealthy Chicago oilman, and George G. Goodwin, assistant curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, after a grueling specimen-hunting expedition which set a record for distance covered in northwest Canada-7,000 miles by plane, pack horse, pack dog, flat-bottomed boat, legwork. The party risked drowning in the Nahanni River. A storm almost blew their plane into Great Slave Lake. Mr. Goodwin was almost eaten by black flies, bulldog flies, midges and mosquitoes while from a blind he filmed giant, sharp-humped wood buffalo wallowing in the dust at a water-hole. Stampeding musk oxen almost ran down a guide. And bears definitely stole the meat the party had hung for safekeeping between trees. Trophies for the American Museum: three blue Stone Mountain sheep, 200 small mammals. The prize trophies, however, will be divided with the Canadian National Museum : six white, Dlack-tailed mountain sheep of a new variety and eight dark northern elk, first specimens of either (so far as Mr. Goodwin knows) ever brought to civilization.

P:Back to Chicago last week from a six-month stay in the Panama Canal Zone went skeptical, inquisitive Professor Alfred Edwards Emerson, University of Chicago zoologist, scornfully denying that he and his family had suffered tropical discomfort. Predictions of insecticide manufacturers that tropical termites will direfully invade the U. S. are absurd, said he, because 1) most of the U. S. is too cold, and 2) fossil termites 30,000,000 years old show close kinship to species now living, so that if these oldtimers could have invaded the U. S., they would have done so long ago.

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