Summer Meeting

A fortnight ago Sir Arthur Keith remarked: "Nature keeps her human orchard healthy by pruning and war is her pruning hook." This was during his rectorial address at the University of Aberdeen, and was the mature judgment of a great anthropologist, the 1927 president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sir Arthur's dictum last week became Professor Franz Boas' rhetorical opportunity. Professor Boas is also a great anthropologist, and 1932 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The A. A. A. S. last week was at Pasadena, holding its first summer meeting. Ordinarily at the regular annual meetings (Christmas school holidays) the incoming president presides and the retiring president gives a learned address. As an innovation for the summer meeting President Thomas Hunt Morgan sat still while President-elect Boas talked.

On the value of war Professor Boas and Sir Arthur disagree diametrically. Cried the American: "I do not see how such a statement can be justified in any way. War eliminates the physically strong. War increases all the devastating scourges of mankind such as tuberculosis and genital diseases. War weakens the growing generation.''

On another population point the two anthropologists disagreed. Sir Arthur had said: "In race antipathy and race prejudice nature has implanted for her own end the improvement of mankind through racial differentiation."

Professor Boas growled back: "I challenge him to prove that race antipathy is implanted by nature and not the effect of social causes which are active in every closed social group, no matter whether it is racially heterogeneous or homogeneous." He offered as proof the willing miscegenation of whites, Indians and Negroes in Central and South America, of white lust for Negro slave wenches in the oldtime U. S. South.

He made a prediction which rankled the citizens of California. His prediction was to the effect that, to the accepted U. S. mixture of European stocks, must eventually come the addition of Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos.

Significant among technical papers were:

16,000,000 Volts, The Germans, Drs. F. Lange and A. Brasch, would have had their expenses paid to Pasadena, if they had been able to get away from their research at the University of Berlin. In lieu of their presence, they sent a report, read by Dr. Alexander Goetz of Caltech, which caused much amazement. In 1927 the two first rigged a wire between two peaks at Monte Generoso, near the Italian-Swiss border. That is a region of frequent and violent thunderstorms. Like Benjamin Franklin, the Germans intended to bring lightning to earth. When the rigging was set and lightning bolted, the emitted sparks jumped a 15-ft. gap. Improved rigging carried lightning sparks which spanned 55 ft. That meant that 16,000,000 volts had momentarily been trapped.

How to utilize that mighty force? A vacuum tube would help. But what kind? Drs. Lange & Brasch returned to Berlin and constructed a trial tube, of layers of paper, rubber and aluminum insulated with cheap oil. In one end was a porcelain window. Through this comparatively simple tube they shot a current of 2,600,000 volts, which the tube withstood. The electronic stream which the current set moving was equivalent to the emanations of 100,000 grams of radium, more than all now in use throughout the world. The rays drilled a one-inch hole in a piece of brass. They passed through a foot of lead. Now Drs. Lange & Brasch are building a similar tube to carry the 16,000.000 volts which lightning often strikes at Monte Generoso. They think they will have almost the equal of Robert Andrews Millikan's cosmic rays.

Listening attentively to Dr. Goetz's reading were the two U. S. men who had built the heretofore most powerful X-ray tubes on earth. William David Coolidge of General Electric built a 900,000-volt tube now in Manhattan's Memorial Hospital for use on cancer patients. Charles Christian Lauritsen has built a 750,000-volt tube at Caltech, is now assembling a 1,200,000-volt copy.

Moon & Earthquakes. Californians can now buy a cheap, durable seismograph to register the earthquakes under their bungalows and skyscrapers. The standard seismograph is useful to record faint local or powerful distant quakes. A strong quake in the near vicinity of such a seismograph wrecks the delicate mechanism. The machines now being set in California consist simply of a pendulum held away from the plumb by a weak trigger. An earth jar releases the pendulum, whose subsequent swinging indicates the direction and force of the earth jolt.

Some shrewd observations by Maxwell W. Allen of Sanger, Calif, indicated that earth quivers along the San Jacinto Valley (a fault in the earth's crust) occurred nearly five hours after the moon passed its meridian. There are three explanations of this coincidence: i) the moon causes a tidal drag in the cracked earth; 2) the moon tide piles up enough water at the head of the Gulf of California to overbalance the insecurely fixed earth; 3) the water and earth tides join their forces.

Neutrons? The three unresolvable basic units of the universe are, according to contemporary physics, the proton (positive electricity), the electron (negative electricity), and the photon (light). There may be a fourth, suggested Dr. W. Pauli of the Institute of Technology at Zurich. He calls it the neutron. Reason for hypothesizing the neutron: When beta rays pop away from a substance like radium, the substance loses a certain amount of energy. But the energy of the departing beta rays is always less than the substance's energy loss. What happens to the difference? Dr. Pauli surmises that it rides away on what he calls a neutron.

Gold & Infantile Paralysis. Drs. Frederick Eberson & William G. Mossman of San Francisco reported a swift detector of infantile paralysis. To a few drops of suspected blood is added a rosy solution of gold. If the disease is present the rosy gold solution flocculates, becomes bluish or violet.

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