Enthronement

Chilly, musty, 875-year-old Christ Cathedral, Canterbury, glittered with medieval pageantry. Trumpeters, clad in blue and gold, blew fanfares; bishops paced in scarlet robes. Finally, the two-hour ritual, older than the Tales of Chaucer, reached its solemn climax:

"By virtue of this mandate, I ... do induct, install and enthrone you, Most Reverend Father in God, Geoffrey . . . into the archbishopric and the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury. . . ."

The personage addressed, wearing a miter and a white brocaded cope with gold embroidery, walked slowly to the 700-year-old marble Chair of St. Augustine, sat gingerly down on its red cushion. With this simple act the Rt. Hon. and Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, 57, last week became the 99th Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England.

Souls & Stomachs

One afternoon in 1903 a Princeton student fell into a chance conversation with a stranger on a trolley. The stranger was a missionary, and what he had to say persuaded the student to go to India for a few months' work among the Untouchables. Last week, after 41 years in India, big, burly, British-born Sam Higginbottom, 70, left his "temporary" job and came back to the U.S. for good.

Like most missionaries, "Smilin' Sam" Higginbottom went to India to save souls for Christianity. When he saw the terrible poverty, he decided that souls could not be saved while the body was starving. Finally the Presbyterian (U.S.A.) mission board heard his persistent plea, brought him back to study agriculture.

A few years later, with $30,000 and an agricultural degree in his pocket, Sam Higginbottom went back to India with modern implements and began farming 275 acres of the poorest land he could find. Discarding the surface-scratching wooden plows which Indians had used for centuries, he cut deep with tractor-drawn, modern plowshares--into amazingly rich soil. His seed sprouted into such grainfields as India had seldom seen.

Using shade trees for classroom roofs, Farmer-Missionary Higginbottom started the Allahabad Agricultural Institute to teach the secret of his miracles. He made princes shed their robes, put on working clothes, and go into the fields to get dirt under their nails just like the Untouchables. Soon, to their native states the student potentates took back a firsthand knowledge of contour farming, water conservation, crop rotation. Today the Allahabad Institute is a 600-acre demonstration farm with a student body of 200.

Sam Higginbottom's missionary labors have been recognized. Princeton invented the degree of Doctor of Philanthropy for him; the British Government decorated him four times; the Presbyterian Church made him its moderator in 1939. Last week he planned to write an agricultural textbook for Indians and to become an American citizen. Said he: "I've just never had five years [necessary to become a citizen] I could spare."

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