Off-Beat Professor

Dr. Gustav Eckstein wears his science with a difference. Associate professor of physiology at the College of Medicine of the University of Cincinnati, he specializes on the nervous system and, presumably, teaches his students what they ought to know about neurons and ganglia.

In his leisure he studies animals, and with a loving eye: not the large zoo animals or the poor, doomed "experimental" animals of laboratories, but mostly small casual creatures (mice, canaries, cockroaches) who lead their skittery lives around his desk. He clocks their habits, weighs their motives, charts their systems of morality. He has a fine eye for a dreamy, pregnant cockroach or an honored canary grown wise with age.

Little Ladders. Out of the professor's observations have come several books. The most successful of these was Canary (1936). The most recent is Everyday Miracle (Harper; $2.75), published last week. Dr. Eckstein's books have a peculiar flavor. The professor is no mere animal lover. He feeds his canaries lemon pie, provides little ladders for mice, and is sad when a favorite cockroach named He-Who-Leaps is eaten (he fears) by a favorite mouse named Patsy. But when he writes about them and their peculiarities, he is generally pointing out in a graceful way some mystery of life.

He tells about a tomcat, for instance, that goes to a bingo game at 7:45 every Monday evening. This reminds Eckstein that no one has found the mechanism which gives men (or animals) the ability to measure time. When he tells about the sleeping habits of his canaries (fagged-out females in the mating season sleep the soundest), he is reminded of another mystery: What is sleep?

The professor works in a cluttered laboratory with a view of a garbage dump and its swarming rat and mouse population. The room is aflutter with canaries, which roost on the rungs of his chair and scatter when he moves. At night, while the professor works, the mice steal out of holes. Their feet patter like rain on the zinc-covered tables, and when one of them chews a seed stolen from the canaries, it makes, says the professor, "a very delicate noise." Cockroaches fade like ghosts in & out of cracks. The birds crane their necks and peer.

Glories of Night. The professor loves the night. "The human mind at such a moment may reflect," he says, "that all the glories of night are a consequence of a trifle of shadow that lies back of the earth, the sun banging through its great system, only here and there blocked by a tiny opaque ball that casts its tiny shadow. Because of that shadow--all the night music, the night poetry, the dark thoughts, the neon signs, the silent seductions, the bats, the thieveries, the large frights, the small frights, the mere worries, the walking of floors careful that no board shall squeak, and these canaries and finches and parakeets getting in their ten hours of sleep."

Not all the professor's life has been spent in his night-hung laboratory. When his books became successful, he drew the attention of Alexander Woollcott and his circle of literary back-scratchers. He had a play, Christmas Eve, produced on Broadway. (It flopped, in spite of an on-stage childbirth.) At other times the professor has traveled widely. In Moscow he met a zoo director with a long Santa Claus beard, who showed him a cage containing not only animals but two pretty girls. This, said the director, was meant "to illustrate the oneness of all living things." Eckstein went to Japan to write a biography of Japanese Scientist Hideyo Noguchi. He also noted that Japan smells of excrement, as Norway smells of rotten fish and southern France of urine.

Last week Professor Eckstein, 57, was busy observing the character of amoebas (brutal), the monogamy of pigeons (not onerous), and the troubles of blonde female canaries that seem to attract too many males.

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