Monday, Apr. 13, 1936
Ants to Stars
Harvard's Astronomer Harlow Shapley never tires of trooping up & down the country telling people about the universe. Last week some 200 sky-lovers gathered at Detroit's Institute of Arts to hear tousle-haired Dr. Shapley discourse on "Exploring the Galaxy." This talk was to be illustrated with stereopticon slides. Few minutes before lecture time a man from the projection room scuttled up to the platform, confessed to the astronomer that the slides had been mislaid. Squirming and damp-browed. Dr. Shapley whispered hoarsely to the man who was about to introduce him:
"Keep talking until they find those damn slides!"
Some years ago Dr. Shapley momentarily put aside his celestial preoccupations to study the ant, discovered that the hotter an ant was the faster it would run, still keeps a bottle of ants on his desk at Harvard Observatory (TIME, July 29). All this the introducer recalled just as he was beginning to grope uncomfortably for something more to say. Dr. Shapley came to his rescue, began to talk glibly and learnedly about ants. Said he: "When you go out of your way to step on an ant, you insult the order of Nature, for you, a mere social upstart, are jumping on a creature that perfected a social system some 30,000,000 years ago!"
After 15 minutes of this a light blinked from the projection room. The slides were found. Harlow Shapley then abandoned entomology, launched out into the starry fields of the Milky Way.
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