For Men At Sea

For entertaining and useful reading for troops on transports, Science Service last week published a chatty, pocket-size book to be distributed by the American Red Cross. Its title: Science from Shipboard. Its purpose: to answer the questions that landlubbers debate at sea--waves and wind, stars and navigation, time and the calendar, sea life, oceanic birds, islands and shore lines, seasickness and homesickness, exposure and thirst.

Each chapter is written by a top-drawer expert (Kirtley Mather, Charles Franklin Brooks, Bart Jan Bok, Charles A. Federer Jr., Ralph Waldo Gerard and others), in chatty, informal style, simply illustrated, and at high-school level. No textbook, Science from Shipboard cuts ruthlessly across academic boundaries between the sciences, starts each topic with a direct human experience. Sample (by Harvard's Mather): "Like every ocean traveler you will be thrilled by each glimpse of land. . . . The most important idea that should be in your mind as you look at any shore is the fundamental fact that it has not always been as you see it today. How did that cliff, harbor, beach, island, or mountain come to be as you see it today? How did it get that way?"

Science from Shipboard is published without profit. Written without hope of royalties, mostly by leading members of the American Association of Scientific Workers, it will be distributed to enlisted men on embarkation, sold in bookstores for 25-c-.

Says famed Astronomer Harlow Shapley in the introduction: "Our success in war and peace depends not on luck, or rhetoric, or the intervention of mythical gods; it depends on human character and modern scientific creations, and on respect for the meaning and methods of science. . . . It is not luck but logic which in the present and future will win--the careful and logical consideration of what effects come from specific causes, what are the natural reasons behind events, what are the processes required to adapt nature to the material and spiritual advantages of mankind."

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