Scientists in Rochester

When the moon eclipsed the sun last week and whipped a band of shadow across Asia (TIME, June 22), the foremost U. S. specialist on solar radiation, Astrophysicist Charles Greeley Abbot of the Smithsonian Institution, was in Rochester, N. Y. showing members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science a cartoon of himself. The sketch: big-mustached, ponderous Dr. Abbot sitting atop California's Mount Wilson with an "Abbot sun and moon measurer," while a little bear points to a Hollywood constellation of stars among which a chunky one represents Mae West.

The cartoon was less funny than the comments with which Dr. Abbot dressed up an astrophysical lecture in Rochester a few months ago. At that event learned Dr. Abbot, 64, told how a policeman once tried to arrest lanky Marine Biologist William Beebe for probing in a snow bank for a dead goldfish. He gave a whistling imitation of an Algerian shepherd boy whom he once heard while searching Algeria for a cloudless site for a solar observatory. He concluded with a baritone rendition of a sea ditty about "a ship that went for to sail with a whale at its tail."

Weather on earth depends upon radiations from the sun. Dr. Abbot receives in his Washington office telegraph and cable reports of the sun's condition as recorded at three solar observatories which the U. S. maintains on Table Mountain, Calif.; Mount St. Catherine, Egypt; Mount Montezuma, Chile. Last week he told the scientists in Rochester that he expected $200,000 from Congress to erect seven more solar observatories. President Roosevelt had written a longhand letter to Senator Joseph Robinson urging the appropriation, said Dr. Abbot.

"I have to be very careful about the observers I send out to the stations," commented Dr. Abbot. "They must have tact, trustworthiness, a ready knowledge of physics, and be able to get along with each other. For they must remain practically isolated from the world for three years at a time. That is a bit too long and something will have to be done about keeping them at their stations for shorter times."

Other vigorous oldsters in the scientific limelight at Rochester last week were Professor Frederick George Novy, 71, of the University of Michigan, and President Edward Bausch, 81, of Rochester's Bausch & Lomb Optical Co. To Septuagenarian Dr. Novy, only living U. S. bacteriologist who studied under Pasteur (1822-95), one of the few living who studied under Koch (1843-1910), prototype of benign and learned Dr. Gottlieb in Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith, Octogenarian Mr. Bausch, who still designs new optical devices, last week gave a newly completed microscope, 250,000th built by Bausch & Lomb during 60 years of manufacturing microscopes. Dr. Novy, however, will not use the microscope himself. Fifty years in laboratories have overstrained his eyes.

Younger men attracted attention at Rochester with the following practical information:

P: Flex tired muscles and keep them tense for several seconds to refresh them. They become fit for another round of fighting or another spurt of running in a much shorter time than if permitted to relax or if stimulated with a hypodermic injection of adrenalin. The reinvigoration is due, theorized Cornell's Drs. S. A. Guttman, R. G. Horton and Davis Truxton Wilber, to either: 1) the release of a potent chemical, acetylcholine, by nerve ends in the tired muscles, or; 2) a sudden excess of calcium in those muscles.

P: Feed a chunky, rolypoly baby a mixture half cow's milk, half water. Feed a long, slim baby a mixture three parts milk, one part water; a "medial" baby two parts milk, one part water. Reason, according to Manhattan's Dr. Isaac Newton Kugelmass: normal cow's milk forms tough curds in baby stomachs, diluted milk forms soft curds. Lanky babies secrete enough gastric juices to digest tough curds with no trouble. Other body types require soft curds for comfort. All types "require 10% of mixed sugars added, with supplements of vitamins D and C. On the other hand all types tolerate breast milk." Other Kugelmass advice: for allergic newborn babies, goat's, evaporated or vegetable milk; for nervous babies, evaporated milk or gruel (milk or water cooked with cornmeal or oatmeal); for pudgy babies who lose weight rapidly and irregularly, evaporated milk.

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