On the Itchen

Distinguished folk are often seen at Southampton, England, but seldom for longer than they are obliged to wrangle with British customs and baggage officials. Yet a fortnight ago some 2,000 distinguished folk entered that ancient town beside the River Itchen, and stayed there for the better part of two weeks, at the annual congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

It was a gathering of all ages that filled the lecture halls of the Hartley Institution. There were venerable gentlemen with fluffy white halos about their erudite pates, who recalled a day when the Association had been rent asunder by the disclosures of Darwin and his interpreter Huxley. There were shingled, short-skirted, plain-spoken young women to whom the vagaries of sex-cell chromosomes and a material conception of the universe were as fit and familar topics of conversation as were knitting and amateur meteorological observations to their grandmothers. There was the mooning notable who wandered, followed by his disciples, for two miles about the town in a pouring rain, "on his way" from one meeting to another. There were petulants who objected at the meetings to fuming pipes and cigaretes in the mouths of their colleagues.

Professor Horace Lamb, the Association's 75-year old President, a Cambridge mathematics man of great note, put matters in motion with a resume of the modern description of Earth's age and structure. Age--"definitely between one and 10 billion years" as estimated by timing the decomposition of uranium and other radioactive elements. Structure--a hades-hot metallic core, rigid as steel; then an envelope of viscous material, kept fluid by enormous pressure, not heat conducting, having faint tides, upon which the earth's ,crust "floats". The elasticity of the envelope which is 60 miles beneath the crust, and the core's rigidity, had been deduced from studying waves of force in earthquake shocks.

Other lectures:

Isostasy. The earth's crust is not uniformly rigid, and a good thing, too. If it were, the stress of gravity would destroy the equilibrium of the spinning globe. The theoretic principle maintaining this equilibrium is called isostasy, manifest in earthquakes, or crust- shiftings. Earthquakes are thus a sort of blessing. To isostasy, these lines:

What is it rules the upper crust?

Isostasy, Isostasy.

What actuates the over thrust?

Isostasy, Isostasy.

What gives the shore lines wanderlust?

What humbles highlands into dust,

What makes the strongest stratum bust?

Isostasy, Isostasy.

Continued isostasy, none the less, will some day belt the Earth with glaciers, drive civilization to the Poles.--Prof. W. A. Parkes, Toronto, Canada.

Virgins. Thirteen generations of moths, nine generations of saw-flies, every member a female, had propagated themselves quite cheerfully without the assistance of males of the species. Attention would next be turned to parthenogenesis in vertebrates, beginning on frogs.--Special Committee.

Geniuses. Among England's legions of unemployed there are indubitably many potential geniuses. Everyone is a genius at something; at something else, an idiot.--Prof. C. Spearman, London.

Clerk vs. Laborer--Some heat was diffused by Dr. W. W. Vaughan, headmaster of famed Rugby School, who addressed his colleagues on the evils of over-education. He did not exactly say that "ignorance is bliss", but that "the farm laborer is often better educated than the clerk, whose head is filled with half-digested facts. A colleague took issue: "Tainted with the public school accent! A man like Dr. Vaughan who educates the more fortunate section of the population, contemplates with equanimity the ignorance of the rest of the country and speaks glibly of its happiness. The plowman may be happier than the clerk, but his. wages are miserably small and his prospects of comfortable old age are remote." A colleague gave support: "There are unhappy, miserable men among the members of the British Association."

Cancer Cinema. Experimental microphotography was progressing toward a point where a cinema film would be made of the life-cycle of the minute organism that causes cancer, but recently discovered (TIME, July 27, MEDICINE). Already pictures had been made of bodies one 250-thousandth of an inch in diameter (one-third the size of any of the microscope-aided eye had ever seen). The short-waved ultraviolet ray will some day be made to carry images of bodies one 500-thousandths of an inch and smaller, by making the photographs in a vacuum.-- Mr. J. E. Barnard, hatter-scientist of Jermyn St., London.

Colored Cats. Long and learned reports were read upon the inheritance of fur color in cats. A mysterious story had got abroad that zoological gardens, cat clubs, museums were anxious to obtain specimens of three-colored cats, such as the rare tortoiseshell, black and yellow hybrid. Result: floods of letters from people with tricolored felines, many ingeniously complicated breeding experiments.

Dr. J. S. Haldane, popular Cambridge biological litterateur, expressed (in picturesque terms) the well known fact that the strength of an organism is not constant with its bulk. Said he: "A mouse can fall down a mine shaft a third of a mile deep without injury. A rat falling the same distance would break his bones; a man would simply splash . . . Elephants have their legs thickened to an extent that seems disproportionate to us, but this is necessary if their unwieldly bulk is to be moved at all ... A 60-ft. man would weigh 1000 times as much as a normal man, but his thigh bone would have its area increased by only 100 times . . . Consequently such an unfortunate monster would break his legs the moment he tried to move."

Candy for Runners. Sugar, of which the system becomes depleted during a race, may be restored by eating candy, and the brink of fatigue thus staved off for a time. --Prof. Yandell Henderson, Yale.

Formaldehyde. "I have made sugar, pounds of it, synthetically from formaldehyde, the common disinfectant, through the action of ultraviolet rays."--Prof. E. C. C. Baly, Liverpool University.

Pop-eyed Lifters. Myopia (shortsightedness) is caused by protruding the eyeballs when heavy lifting is attempted. Rest and instruction has restored 43% of the cases treated.--Dr. F. W. Edridge-Green, London.

A Tolerance for Acid. Muscles under the stress of athletic contests "go in debt for oxygen and produce lactic acid, similar to the acid of sour milk. Athletic training consists in development of tolerance for acid in muscles by means of an accumulation of alkali which neutralizes the acid developed by violent exercise. Recovery is effected by oxygen breathed in after the race." Scientists should make good athletic coaches. Physiological tests will reveal to the budding athlete "what sport to try."--Prof. A. V. Hill, London.

Sir Oliver. At the closing session Sir Oliver Lodge rose to his feet, said he: "Men of Science would do well to talk plain English. The most abstruse questions can very well be discussed in our own tongue ... I make a particular appeal to the botanists, who appear to delight in troublesome words." A discussion followed.