Medal

British scientists look ahead. An eminent one -- the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute -- last week wrote to Dr. Ales Hrdlicka,* curator of physical anthropology in the National Museum (Washington, D. C.), to notify him that he had been honored with the Huxley Memorial Medal/- for 1927 and would be expected in London a year from November to deliver the 1927 Huxley lecture before the Royal Anthropological Institute. No U.S. scientist save Professor William Zebina Ripley of Harvard (in 1908) had been so honored. It was recognition, gratifying indeed, of Dr. Hrdlicka's whole career, and in particular of his earth-circling trip last year when he discovered a pure American Indian type among Asian aborigines; noted scattered strains of Negrito stock as far apart as India, Africa and the Philippines; studied towheaded Negroes in Australia; found fossils of a new type of big ape in the Siwalik Hills of Burma; a new place (the Solo Valley) to dig for remains of the Java ape man; two new cave men's skeletons in the Broken Hill country, Rhodesia, South Africa (TIME, Nov. 16 et seq.).

* Pronounced "Herd-litch-ka."

/-In memory of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), who is probably better known to the average U.S. undergraduate today as a character in a ribald polysyllabic ditty beginning: Recent exhaustive researches By Darwin and Huxley and Hall . . . than as the biologist who first generalized upon the development of ectoderm and endoderm, who "freed British scientific thought from its vice of deductive reasoning," who interpreted, clarified, broadened the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis.