A. A. A. S. in Syracuse

Every seventh person in the U. S. should be sterilized because he is stupid, crazy or going crazy. California has already unsexed 7,500 of its inhabitants. Twenty-six other States and one Canadian Province allow the same procedure. Let the other 21 states follow suit.

Leaflets exhorting members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to labor for eugenic sterilization greeted them when they assembled at Syracuse University last week for their midsummer meeting. Distributors of the leaflets were agents of the Human Betterment Foundation, a California organization created and financed by Ezra Seymour Gosney, a Pasadena banker. Founder Gosney, 76, is president: his two daughters and their husbands are trustees. Other trustees are Banker Henry Mauris Robinson, close friend of Herbert Hoover, and Biologist Paul ("Population") Popenoe.*

The 300 confused A. A. A. scientists who attended the convention (3,000 were expected) stuffed the sterilization leaflets in their pockets, hastened to see the stadium which the late, scandalous Ivar Kreuger helped build when he was a young engineer. Syracuse did not want the A. A. A S. meeting until next December. A. A A. S. originally was to meet with the American Physical Society at New Haven last week. But Yale did not want the A. A. A. S. in summer. Syracuse was forced to become host.

As at New Orleans last December the A. A. A. S. meeting at Syracuse last week was intellectually and physically headless. To New Orleans did not go retiring President William Hunt Morgan of Caltech or incoming President Franz Boas of Columbia. Both were seriously ill. Last week President Boas, still ill, was in Europe. By habit the A. A. A. scientists mustered gumption for the reading of a few papers.

Psychology of Capital Edward Let Thorndike (Columbia psychologist) presented a literate, lucid thesis on this subject Excerpts: "It is true that manual labor built railroads, bridges and homes, but it is also true that, except for the direction of that manual labor by non-manual planning, these would never have been built. Manual labor, undirected by science invention and management would have hardly built huts to keep out the weather and would today make playthings out of the factories and bonfires out the schools. Manual labor has been a ready to waste itself for years in building pyramids as to dam the Nile. It is direction from the mind that has built granaries rather than graves. . . . This is as sure as that a million cows would not ot themselves feed a single human child.

"The myth of Capital as the oppressor rests upon a verbal confusion of Capital with capitalists, a factual confusion ot capitalists with managers, and a misconception of the powers and desires of managers. Material capital does, of course, oppress certain forms of labor (or more truly of mental capital) when a new invention replaces their skill by a machine and requires them to fall back on mere unskilled labor as their offering to purchase the world's goods. But in the long run it is a great aid and weapon of labor.

"The myth that says Capital is an angel with a flaming sword who keeps Labor out of Eden really means that capitalists are a sharp and greedy lot who fool the laborers."

Were American Indians Polynesians? Ales Hrdlicka (Smithsonian anthropologist now in Alaska) is certain that Mongolian-like peoples traveled across Bering Strait and eventually became Amerinds. Helen H. Roberts (of Yale's Institute of Human Relations) last week argued that Amerinds were originally Polynesians transported by canoe from the Pacific Islands. The Polynesian and American aborigines seem to have made cultural contacts long before European ships joined the two primitive races. Mis Roberts bases her arguments on 60 remarkable similarities between Polynesian and Amerind customs. Both groups make flutes of human bones, blow them through their noses, have conches for trumpets, gourds for whistles. Other similar customs include drinking from a human skull (the Vikings did likewise), spreading the ear lobe, killing the wife or husband upon the spouse's death, using feathers for money, deforming skulls, shaving heads in ridges, burying a live human being under a house's foundation.

Common Colds last only three or four days and make the victims immune for three months, decided Wilson George Smillie (Harvard public health administrator) after studying four isolated communities--in Labrador at Spitsbergen on the Island of St. John in the Virgin Islands and in a southern Alabama hill town. In each community the inhabitants were free of colds until strangers arrived. The experience of Spitsbergen where men mine coal all year round was sharply defined. From November when the last heat departed until the day after the first boat arrived the next spring no miner had a cold, although they lived in hot, stuffy barracks, went out into blustery cold every morning, picked coal at temperatures below freezing and returned tired each evening to their steaming quarters. Their healthiness suggested that drafts, bad weather, or freezing have nothing per se to do with common colds. In the spring the mailman went to the first ship for mail. A few hours later he was sniffling. Next day everybody in Spitsbergen had a cold, which suggested again that the virus which causes colds travels swiftly.

To Salvage the Aged, reasoned Paul Strong Achilles (Psychological Corp.* director) is an obligation of psychologists. Six million people, one out of every 20 in the U.S. are over 65. Two million of them lack work because employers, fearing that oldsters are slow and can learn no new tricks, will not hire people over 40. Columbia's Edward Lee Thorndike has demonstrated that this is a misconception. The capacity to learn diminishes very little between 20 years (the peak) and 55. Walter Richard Miles (Yale psychologist) has shown that septuagenarians do things more speedily than the average person of 50.

Killing Looks, Magnetic Personalities are physical realities if Otto Rahn's (Cornell bacteriologist) measuring devices have not deceived him. Living plants and creatures emanate an electromagnetic wave which is shorter and more penetrating, although much less strong than ultraviolet light from the sun. These waves now seem to be the "psychic auras" which spiritualists have vowed perceiving. Ghosts may be realities. Onions radiate comparatively powerful waves from their tips. Strongest human radiations proceed from the finger tips of the right hand. Lett finger tips also produce a comparatively powerful emanation. One woman complained that flowers withered at her touch. The tip of the nose is also a sending station of these waves. Just before Professor Rahn left Cornell for Syracuse he scanned some yeast cells. They promptly died.

*Books" on the subject: STERILIZATION FOR HUMAN BETTERMENT--E. S. Gosney &; P. Popenoe--Macmillan ($2); HUMAN STERILIZATION-- J. H. Landman--Macmillan ($4).

*A commercial corporation of psychologists who for fees advise business houses on the mental ability and emotional stability of employes and officers, tell individuals how to improve their personalities, get better jobs. Chairman of Psychological Corp. is Dr. James McKeen Cattell editor of Science. President is Edward Lee Thorndike of Columbia. Directors include President James Rowland Angell of Yale.

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