Philosophical Hobgoblins

Hobgoblins minced and Giants lumbered inside a very old Philadelphia building last week. The building, a small brick one, stands on Independence Square, close to Independence Hall. A label calls it the Hall of the American Philosophical Society. A large group of learned men, philosophers in the old sense of searchers after truth in any of the sciences, including natural history, heard the tread of the Giants and Hobgoblins.

The Giants looked very much like men. The smallest was at least twice the size of any of the men in the Philosophers' Hall. They all glowered about rather stupidly from under thick eyebrows. And their lower jaws stuck out like the scoops of steam shovels. Their feet and hands were disproportionately huge. The fingers were shaped like clubs, without grace. Hair grew on the backs of the fingers and hands. The faces of those who were shaven showed many coarse wrinkles, like a harvested hay field.

The Hobgoblins also looked very much like men. They were one or two inches taller than the average learned man in Philadelphia last week. The younger ones were slender. All had big hips and small chests, long legs, short arms, slim hands, feet, toes, fingers. Most were baldheaded, most wore eyeglasses. The eyes, deep-set, showed high intelligence. But most eyes showed the shiftiness of neurasthenia, sometimes the glitter of insanity. They all had high, brainy foreheads, thin skulls, prominent narrow noses, prominent chins, small mouths, rotten, few and irregular teeth. Faces were pimply, blotched and lined from organic disease.

Like the Hobgoblins future men will look. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced ahles herd-li-ka) said so at Philadelphia last week. He is Curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology of the U. S. Museum of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D. C. He derived his picture, conjured the Hobgoblins, from his knowledge of human evolution and environment.

The Giants are a nearer possibility. To create them it is merely necessary to feed babies the anterior lobe of the pituitary gland, as Harvard's bulldog was fed. Perhaps some experimenter has already, secretly, toyed with a human in such fashion. But Dr. Oscar Riddle of the Carnegie Institution's Animal Experiment Station at Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y., merely told the philosophers at Philadelphia that made-to-order giants are now feasible.

These fantastics were not the only things presented last week to the American Philosophical Society, oldest (202 years) learned group in the U. S.

Two sages, Dr. James Henry Breasted, Orientalist of the University of Chicago and Dr. George Aaron Barton, Semitist of the University of Pennsylvania, debated on which was the older civilization, Egyptian or Mesopotamian. Dr. Breasted said that the Egyptians' technical attainments in medicine, art, science, sculpture and social organization predicted a civilization already ancient 5,500 years ago. Pharaohs mined copper in the Sinai Peninsula as early as 3400 B. C. Dr. Barton suavely pointed out that the Sumerians in Babylonia made gold and silver objects as early as 3500 B. C. and more beautiful than anything produced in Egypt until hundreds of years later. Those early Sumerians knew agricultural arts and had a fairly complex social system.

Report of further experiments to prove his bipolar theory of life came from Cleveland's Dr. George Washington Crile. He considers that every living cell is a tiny electrical cell, that the body is a battery with the brain the positive pole and the liver the negative pole (TIME, Aug. 30. 1926). Last week he reported that he had found that every living cell has a definite electrical potential, or tension; that as that potential decreases the cell becomes enfeebled until it dies. When an electric current with a potential opposite to that of a cell is passed through it, then that cell dies. The cell's potential depends on its semipermeable film, on certain electrolytic concentrations, water, temperatures, oxidation. They all create the potential. It is the electrical charge on the cell which permits the cell to adapt itself to changes. Oxidation occurs only in the presence of the charge and in turn creates the charge. After his observations, Dr. Crile believes that he has come very close to an explanation of life itself.

Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute provided a generally acceptable explanation and description of cancer cells. Those malignant cells, he has found, do not grow faster than normal cells. Nor do they have more growth energy. Nor are they necessarily diseased. They do, however, differ from normal cells in their physiological properties. Chief difference is the fact that they use nitrogen. The nitrogen they get from proteins or protein-split products. And of those the body has an unlimited store. That is why cancer cells can multiply (not grow in size) so rapidly.