A. A. A. S. Meeting (Cont.)

At the Des Moines, Iowa, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (TIME, Jan. 6), papers read and points made included the following :

Pigmies. Black manikins parading pompously in a Pharaoh's circus, a Roman lady's ebony toy boy, a living statuette of jet in a Chinese garden--vestiges of their pigmy race peered from New Guinea bushes when Smithsonian's Matthew Williams Stirling flew to the island's mountain reaches. The little men overcame their suspicions of the big explorer. They offered him their bananas, sugar cane and taro, cultivated and prepared with the only three tools they knew of--an axe, a flat, curved knife, a chisel, all made of stone. They made him fire by rubbing sticks together. They showed him how they cremated their little dead. And they laughed as they entertained him. He offered them modern steel tools. They shyly asked for bright shells and beads. He learned a few of their phrases--short words and monosyllables. Their language, like that of the Andaman Island pigmies, was uniquely their own. Others of these minuscule peoples, whom bigger intruders have driven from their original homes along the Congo, have learned the speech of their neighbors wherever they have secreted themselves successfully enough to persist--in Africa's interior, along the upper Congo, in Ceylon, the Bay of Bengal, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines.

Privy Fuel. Into underground tanks, similar to his up-to-date farm privy, let the farmer dump his field debris--straw, stalks, husks. They will ferment and produce methane (marsh) gas. Twenty pounds of pulped debris will develop 100 cu. ft. of gas, enough to light and heat the average farm house for a day. Corn stalks from 40 acres will give a winter's supply of gas. After the gas is exhausted the sediment in the tank can be purified and made into paper.--Illinois' Arthur Moses Buswell.

The Veterinary & the Doctor. To show that doctors of men must respect and cooperate with doctors of animals, the Department of Agriculture's John Robbins Mohler (pathologist) listed some livestock diseases which menace man--tuberculosis, glanders, foot-&-mouth disease, undulant fever, rabies, trichinosis, tularemia, rat-bite fever, erysipelas, cow pox, measles.

396,000,000 "Circumferences." When Iowa's Ernest Horn became wrought up over the inadequacy of the English alphabet to represent sounds accurately, he started calculating--14 sounds for "s," 22 for "long e," 21 for "ir," etc. Variant spellings for "ir" intrigued him: (h) er, (s) ir, (ch) or (ade), (c) er (tain), err, (theat)re (m)yrrh. For lowan reasons were included (n)ear, (hon)or. When he finished with "circumference," he figured 396,000,000 phonetic spellings for it.

Differing Twins. One's ability and personality are not absolutely fixed by birth, but may be influenced by home, school and community, decided Chicago's Frank Nugent Freeman, after noting how twins resembled each other in height, weight, general shape and size, fingerprints, but differed in general mental ability, and still more in temperament and special skills.

Micro-Sticks & Stones. A graphic phrase, "micro-sticks and micro-stones," the U. S. Weather Bureau's William Jackson Humphreys coined to emphasize how technically impure is the air man breathes. Always in the atmosphere are bits of rock, vegetable fibre, litter, salt (over oceans), sulphuric acid (from soft coal chimneys and volcanoes), nitric acid (from lightning), meteoritic ash. The bronchial tubes get rid of most of such debris with almost no harm to the body.

24,000,000 Meteors. Patient count and systematic estimation indicated to Iowa's Charles Clayton Wylie that 24 million meteors enter the earth's atmosphere daily. The dim ones, and almost all are dim, become visible about 75 mi. from earth's surface and burn out quickly. The bright ones explode about 15 mi. up. Relatively few fragments strike land.

Tuberculosis Sugars. Tuberculosis is a disease in which two living factors are concerned, the bacillus of tuberculosis and the body cells called monocytes. The bacillus lives parasitically within the monocyte. Each has its individual living chemistry. Together they have a third metabolism which causes the tubercles of tuberculosis to grow. This third chemistry varies with the strain of the bacillus and its animal host (man, cow, fowl, fish). But always typical compounds result--of fats with sugars, albumins with sugars. The fats and albumins in all types uf tuberculosis are very much alike. But the sugars differ greatly. Hence the sugars are suspected of bearing a close relation to the disease and it is the sugars which tuberculesis researchers are trying to control. Hope lies in using light or some other catalyst to swing the chemical combinations of the sugars with fats and sugars with albumins away from those forms which seem to stimulate the growth of tubercles.--William Charles White, U. S. Public Health Service.

Moon Explosion. Dwight Webster Longfellow, who manufactures concrete products at Elk River, Minn., offered an unorthodox theory to account for certain odd phenomena--the freezing of mastodons in Siberia with half eaten grass in their mouths, the sudden razing of forests whose fossils are found lying horizontally, the drifting of continents, the dislocation of Arctic, Temperate and Torrid Zones, the failure of the magnetic poles to coincide with the terrestrial poles. Mr. Longfellow's theory is that the moon in comparatively recent times popped out from where the Pacific now is and suddenly jerked the earth awry.

Foolish Doodlebugs. Neither doodlebugs nor forked sticks nor any instrument known to man will locate oil under the surface. The best a geologist can do with all the tools of science at his service is to locate underground formations where oil might have seeped. Thus the geologist can prevent useless digging. When he picks the site of a probable well, he studies the subsurface rock and sand, particularly for those minute fossil animals called foraminifera whose deep presence almost always means oil a little ways farther down. So accurate have geologists become in their prospecting, so reliable that of 170 wells recently drilled, geologists indicated 157. Only 13 were wildcats.--Oklahoma's Charles Newton Gould.

Talent. Two common beliefs that should be destroyed--that a young person possessing a first-class mind will inevitably find an appropriate outlet for his ability, that in our educational system today teachers are sufficiently competent to recognize mental ability of a high order. Creative talent is astonishingly common. But it very often fails to fruit because it is not recognized and encouraged as such or because it is expended in unimportant and hence unprofitable and unnoticed directions. Likewise the qualities of leadership are much more common than the number of leaders indicates. The difference is caused by the failure of contact of the challenge with the individual. --Iowa's George Walter Stewart.

Association Prize. Each year the A. A. A. S. gives $1,000 to the author of some notable contribution presented at its annual meeting. Last week the prize money went to Chicago's Toronto-born Professor Arthur Jeffrey Dempster, 43. He made the final demonstration of what has has been conceived theoretically: that every last minute thing so far imagined in the universe is a vibrating bundle of radiant energy. In 1926 Chicago's Arthur Holly Compton showed that light is not only a wave but a stream of particles (photons). The next year Bell Telephone Laboratories' Clinton Joseph Davisson and Lester Halbert Germer proved that electrons (negative particles of electricity) behave as waves. Remained to be demonstrated that protons (positive particles of electricity, the core of atoms) also act as waves. To do this Professor Dempster put a trifle of hydrogen gas in a cathode tube. With the cathode rays he pounded the hydrogen atoms until the rays sucked the hydrogen protons away from their atoms (leaving, of course, freed electrons to skitter about). The released protons bombarded a crystal of calcite. which next to diamond has the most orderly internal structure, and passed through to strike upon a photographic plate. The pattern they marked on the plate was similar to the patterns which both light waves and electron vibrations make. This prepared physicists to accept as fact that the three ultimates of nature--photons, protons and electrons--are all radiant, vibrating particles.

Officers. Manhattan's Henry Fairfield Osborn made his presidential valedictory a repetitive exposition of his latest view of evolution--that man and monkeys are so remotely related that they should not be considered congeners. California Tech's Robert Andrews Millikan, for his presidential initiation, read a journalistic paper entitled "Alleged Sins of Science." In it he advised men "who are living in fear lest some bad boy among the scientists may some day touch off the [subatomic] fuse and blow this comfortable earth of ours to star dust [to] go home and henceforth sleep in peace with the consciousness that the creator* has put some fool-proof elements into his handiwork and that man is powerless to do it any titanic damage anyway."

Dr. Millikan's paper was the nearest approach to a philosophical interpretation of the labors of Science such as the president of the homologous British Association for the Advancement of Science prepares annually. Succeeding Dr. Millikan in the presidency next year will be his Caltech colleague, Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan, 63, biologist.

*Scientist Millikan's father was a preacher.

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