Winter Medley

Bravely forgetful of salary reductions which their trustees might be contemplating, thousands of college teachers made expensive dashes across the country last week to attend one or more of the scientific congresses which make the Christmas school holiday a clamorous medley of "I saw that . . .", "I did this. . . ." In New Orleans, together with 33 smaller, affiliated organizations, met the American Association for the Advancement of Science.* Its incoming president, Professor Franz Boas of Columbia University, was bedridden in Manhattan, vexed that he could not take over what the public assumes to be the most eminent office in U. S. Science. In his absence his colleagues discussed the 100 & 1 topics infiltrated with Science. Items:

Lucidity, Everyone who presents a paper before the A. A. A. S. must deal with Austin Hobart Clark, longtime expert for the Smithsonian Institution on oceanography, sea life, birds and bugs, onetime aide-de-camp to Louis, oceanophilic Prince of Monaco. Mr. Clark is director of the A. A. A. S.'s press service. He must make certain that facts are fit to print. Few men with technical education can express themselves lucidly. From Mr. Clark they learned that "manuscripts and abstracts should be written in the simplest possible language, and in such a way as to be under stood by any educated person who lacks detailed knowledge of the subject treated. Especially should the broader aspects of the subject be presented, and its possible bearing on work in other lines and on thought in general." For fear that his insistence on lucidity made him obnoxious to A. A. A. S. members, he begged them to regard him "as an involuntary, though persistent sinner" against obscurantism.

Nerves & $1,000. Each year an anonymous A. A. A. S. member gives $1,000 for a noteworthy paper presented at the annual meeting. The donor wishes to aid younger men with cash, rather than honor older ones with kudos. Last week the $1,000 went to Carl Caskey Speidel, 38, associate professor of anatomy at the University of Virginia. He won it for inventing a way of seeing nerves grow in a live tadpole's tail. He clamped an embryonic frog under his microscope and indirectly illuminated the tail by a method called "dark field lighting." Thus over periods of weeks he was able to see that nerves branch out from the spinal cord and spread, like the roots and branches of a plant, into all parts of the body. His lighting method also enabled him to see that a cut nerve cannot be spliced and made to function again. New nerve material must grow out from the root, repair the damage.

Swann's Courtesan, Dr. William Francis Gray Swann, president of the American Physical Society, looked waggish as he talked in ancient puns on "reality." In reality he was deadly serious. Said he: "Reality is the most alluring of all courtesans, for she makes herself what you would have her at the moment. But she is no rock on which to anchor your soul, for her substance is of the stuff of shadow; she has no existence outside your own dreams and is often no more than the reflection of your own thoughts shining upon the face of nature. The materialist will tell me that . . . he sees me standing here, a three-dimensional being, with length, breadth and thickness, and that, in this sense, I have obviously three dimensions. Alas! I have sought to point out to him that the impression which he gets of me is obtained through a two-dimensional image on the retinas of his eyes; that he sees me twice over, once in each eye; that he sees me upside down, and that what the left eye sees the righthand side of his brain interprets."

33 Murders a Day. Every day last year 33 murders occurred throughout the U. S., according to compilations of Professor Kenneth E. Barnhart of Birmingham-Southern College. His own Birmingham is fourth most murderous city. Best is long-leading Memphis, where murder is called "involuntary suicide." Thirty cities ranking in this respect, together with the numbers of murders they have for each 100,000 of the population, are:

Memphis 58.8 Springfield, Ill. 27.7

Atlanta 52.6 El Paso 27.2

Lexington, Ky. 52.4 Charleston, S. C. 25.9

Birmingham 49.0 Houston 25.2

Shreveport, La. 41.4 Roanoke, Va. 24.4

Augusta, Ga. 41.4 Norfolk 23.8

Nashville 37.6 Winston-Salem ...23.7

Miami 36.8 Dallas 23.6

Savannah 36.4 Little Rock 23.2

Jacksonville 34.5 New Orleans 23.0

Macon 31.6 Kansas City 22.7

Mobile 30.7 Pueblo 21.9

Gary, Ind. 30.6 Knoxville 21.6

Hamtramck, Mich. 30.1 Petersburg, Va. 21.2

Tampa 28.4 E. St. Louis, Ill. 20.1

New York City's rate was 7.1, Chicago's 14.4. Rates for other large cities: Philadelphia 7.7; Detroit 13.3; Los Angeles 6.6; Cleveland 17.0; St. Louis 16.8; Baltimore 14.3; Pittsburgh 10.0; Boston 1.9. Boston's good record. Professor Barnhart believes, is due to Massachusetts' strict laws against carrying weapons.

Heat & Sex, The outer case of an egg is its female element, the stuffing its male element, with temperature determining the predominance of either, contended Dr. Emil Witschi of the University of Iowa. To support his argument he showed pictures of incubating frog eggs. Those which were maintained at 59DEG F. grew thick shells, became female polliwogs. Those maintained at 82DEG F. developed big insides, turned into male tadpoles.

To this argument that heat makes the man, Dr. Oscar Riddle of the Carnegie Institution contributed other facts. Males have more red blood than females, burn up more oxygen. This heat production he showed was "the most essential difference between the sexes" and is found upon an early and persistent difference in the rate of oxidation in the egg, embryo and adult.

Spider People. Dr. William Patten has been professor of zoology at Dartmouth since 1893. Even before then he was arguing with colleagues that every bony creature, including man, is descended from a spider-like sea thing. For 40 years he has been hunting some old rock specimen as proof of his hypothesis. Last week he displayed at New Orleans what he considered definitive proof. It was a fossilized marine scorpion recently found on the island of Oesel in the Baltic Sea. From the scorpion descended, in one direction (reasoned the professor), spiders, land scorpions, horseshoe crabs ; and in another direction, the extinct ostracoderms which in turn fathered fishes, reptiles, animals and man. For a few days every mother's embryonic son still resembles the extinct sea scorpion.

Anger is an essential safety valve to thwarted self-assertion, ego, or pride. Men lose their tempers 39% more often than women. There is on the average only one day a week when the average male stu dent does not lose his temper at least once. Girl students are serene three full days a week. -- Dr. Hyman Meltzer, St. Louis.

Reviver. Professor Frank Alexander Hartman of the University of Buffalo described the marvelous effect of the adrenal extract which he calls "cortin" (TIME, June 22 et seq.): "In certain illnesses due to overwork or the effect of an infection, this extract has been demonstrated to in crease the resistance to fatigue, or to cause it to disappear. It has brought about restful sleep . . . and has developed a sense of well being." Cost of cortin "pick-me-ups" at present prices is $100 a dose effective for three full days of sprightliness.

Infantile Paralysis. To Processor Frederick Eberson of University of California Medical School and Dr. William G. Mossman of San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital went credit for isolating a nearly invisible organism which their experiments indicate is the cause of infantile paralysis. They are now trying to make vaccines and serums to prevent the disease.

Light is Constant. On the assumption that light, no matter where it goes, always covers the same space in the same time, Albert Einstein built up his relativity theories. But light's constancy has been only an assumption. Now it has been fairly proven by Drs. Roy James Kennedy and Edward Moult on Thorndike of Caltech. Previous light-measurers matched light's speed against the speed at which a man in Quito, Ecuador, practically on the Equator, moves around the centre of the Earth each day. Quito travels 1,000 m. p. h. The man's hat does not blow away because it is traveling exactly as fast as his head. Drs. Kennedy & Thorndike matched their measurements against both the Earth's daily rotation on its own axis and its yearly revolution around the Sun. The revolution proceeds at 18 1/2 mi. a second, or about 66,600 m. p. h. During six months, while their test lights darted from one universal direction to another, the investigators took 2,500 photographs to record the effect of rotation, 300 for the effect of revolution. If time affects the speed of light, their pictures would have shown the distortion. They found no variation, and therefore gave more substance to the Einstein assumption.

New President. The high honor the A. A. A. S. offers elder scientists is its presidency. President Thomas Hunt Morgan, 65, zoologist, director of the William G. Kerckhoff Laboratories of the Biological Sciences at California Institute of Technology retired at last week's meeting. His 1932 successor, Professor Franz Boas, 73, Columbia anthropologist, was too ill to travel from Manhattan to New Orleans to assume office. In his absence the A. A. A. S. chose his successor for 1933--Dr. John Jacob Abel, 74, Johns Hopkins' great pharmacologist, the crystallizer of insulin (hormone which controls diabetes) and synthesizer of epinephrine (hormone which regulates blood pressure). He is the first pharmacologist president in the A. A. A. S.'s 83 years.

When President-elect Abel assumes office at Atlantic City next Christmas holiday, he may have a great announcement to make. Established to his honor at Johns Hopkins is the John Jacob Abel Fund for Research on the Common Cold. Francis Patrick Garvan, who four years ago created the fund, so far has given to it $173,750 of the Chemical Foundation's wealth, will during the next year give another $36.250. Then he will stop giving and the Research on the Common Cold will have concluded its five years' schedule of investigation. So far the Research has produced chiefly negations: the common cold is not caused by that, that or the other. The one positive result is the certainty that colds are caused by a filtrable virus transmitted from person to person through nose & throat. Ground, cleared of weedy hypotheses and surmises, may give results this year.

*Other societies with more or less scientific intention met separately at Tulsa, Rochester, N. Y., Andover, Mass., New Haven, Manhattan, Washington, Baltimore, Detroit. Ypsilanti, Mich., Minneapolis.

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