National Academy

Between Princeton University and the Rockefeller Institute's Department of Pathology at Plainsboro, N. J., Thomas Hunt Morgan led his colleagues of the National Academy of Sciences last week, to tell each other about their new & old conjectures concerning matters great & small, viz:

P: Primitive men followed the tracks of primitive elephants (Proboscidea), which originated in Africa, through Europe, Asia and across a land bridge at Bering Strait to North America. (Henry Fairfield Osborn, American Museum of Natural History.)

P: In Northwestern Alaska an advanced stoneage people, earlier than the Indians, learned to utilize walrus ivory. Their traces were recently discovered. (Ales Hrdlicka, National Museum, Washington.)

P: In the future physicians will make greater use of living germs for vaccines, instead of the present killed-germ vaccines, for immunization against disease. Biological laboratories would make the therapeutic germs comparatively harmless by long periods of propagation. (Theobald Smith, Rockefeller Institute.)

P: May not the filtrable viruses, the poisons which transmit some diseases, belong to a special class of substances of peculiar chemical structure, or be related to ferments or catalysts which initiate chemical transformations of many kinds without themselves changing? (Simon Flexner, Rockefeller Institute.)

P: Enzymes are products of certain living cells, which like catalysts cause specific chemical reactions. An enzyme has now, for the first time, been crystallized. It is pepsin, which digests food. Crystallization was accomplished by John Howard Northrop, Rockefeller Institute.

P: Water is thickest just before it freezes, because its constituent atoms arrange themselves into blocks before ice crystals take form. This is a new discovery and applies also to the crystallization of metals. (Robert Andrews Millikan, California Institute of Technology.) From the immediate, the Academicians moved their thoughts to the remote.

P: There is an ether through which the stellar bodies move, reiterated Dayton Clarence Miller, Case School of Applied Science.

P: New evidence that the cosmic rays penetrate 500 to 700 feet of ground, that they result from either the smash-up of electrons and protons within stars or (more probably) from the clumping of hydrogen atoms into larger atoms (notably helium, oxygen, silicon, iron) was presented by their most active explainer--Robert Andrews Millikan.

P: Stars, star clouds, galaxies, super-galaxies in their relationships, movements and extents--these are items in what has become Harvard's Harlow Shapley's stock lecture. At Princeton he delivered it with vivacity, then went over to the College of the City of New York to entertain an evening audience with his scheme for classifying all known systems of material bodies.

At the pivot of the scheme are the satellitic systems, as Earth and its Moon, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings. From those vastnesses Astronomer Shapley proceeds in one (plus) direction to greater vastitudes, to thinly perceived intangibilities (see chart below). Only slightly nearer man's comprehension are the sub-minute evanescences at the other (minus) end of Dr. Shapley's scale. He makes 19 classifications, the first and last of which scientists feel sure exist but cannot prove. Dr. Shapley believes that at least the first will be filled in within a generation, just as the gaps of the periodic table of the elements have been filled in. Looking thus "at the universe from outside, a high adventure armed with the instruments of science," man is a puny organization of colloids.

The Shapely System

-7 (Something prevading at all?)

-6 Corpuscles

(A something here?)

Quanta

Protons

Electrons

-5 Atoms (hydrogen to uranium)

-4 Molecules (1 to infinity)

-3 Molecular Aggregates

Crystals

Colloids

-2 Colloidial and Crystal Aggregates

Inorganic substances (e.g. minerals, meteroites, clouds )

Organic substances (vegetable & animal worlds)

-1 Meteoritic Associations

Comets

Meteor streams

Diffuse Nebulae

0 Satellitic Systems

Earth-Moon type

Jovian type

Saturnian type

+1 Planetary Structures

(Earth belongs here)

Stars, with corona & meteors

Stars with planets, comets, etc.

(The Sun belongs here)

Stars with nubulous rings or envelopes

+2 Double and Multiple Stars

+3 Galactic Clusters (e.g. "The Milky Way")

+4 Globular Clusters

+5 Star clouds

+6 Galaxies

+7 Super-Galaxies

+8 Groups of Super Galaxies

+9 Cosmoplasma

Interstellar gas

Interstellar electrons and protons

Radiation

(Loose energy?)

+10 The Universe (Einstein's space-time complex)

+11 (Something enveloping all?)

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