Hines Hailed
Stands & Stores
Sirs:
It is unfortunate for occasional TIME readers that your publication cannot be secured with more ease at the corner or neighborhood drug stores and news stands. I have actually driven to every stand and drug store in Shreveport trying to get a copy.
Please send me your subscription rates.
J. THERON BROWN
Shreveport, La.
Sale of TIME, hitherto limited to prominent news stands in large cities, is now being extended to all cities and to smaller stands patronized by TIME-readers. TIME welcomes information such as New Sub scriber Brown gives, will forthwith "cover" Shreveport's news stands. -- ED.
Hines Hailed
Sirs: After a hard and hot day's work in the Veterans' Bureau it was a pleasure a few minutes ago, upon a necessarily hasty perusal of TIME (July 21) to see looking from its pages the face of our "Big Boss" General Hines. Will you give space in your interesting columns for a slight tribute from one of the many thousands who work under General Hines, and who feel the quiet strength of his personality pervading the atmosphere of the entire Veterans' Bureau, shortly to be known as--give me time--Oh yes --as the "Veterans' Administration"? How about putting his picture on the cover? And, Mr. Hoover--how about creating a cabinet office for the head of the most important branch of the Government? We have never felt that General Hines has been given quite the public recognition that he deserves--not that he is the kind of person who cares a straw about it--a more modest, unpretentious gentleman it would be hard to imagine. Whenever he comes among us it is done so quietly and unostentatiously that--to be Irish --we do not know he is there until after he has gone--and then we feel a sense of something having happened--the unconscious influence of a strong personality and character which somehow makes itself felt without words. Tireless and conscientious in the fulfillment of his many arduous duties all over the country, he is yet accessible to the humblest employe of the Bureau. . . . If General Hines leaves us, as a result of the new combination we shall certainly regret the day it occurred. Being Director of the Veterans' Bureau as it is, is a herculean task for any man. . . . CLAUDINE FERGUSON
Washington. D. C.
First G. O. P. Wetness
Sirs:
In the issue of TIME for July 7 I believe your correspondent is in error in stating that if New Jersey Republicans adopt a Wet platform they will be the first group of party to repudiate the 18th Amendment.
Reason. On May 24, 1930, the Washington state Republican convention, at Bellingham, adopted a plank calling for the repeal of the Amendment. Also swerved from Hoover leadership by opposing entrance into World Court.
Significance. Washington Republicans put Senator Wesley Jones (coauthor of the Five & Ten law) between a political devil and a deep sea of wet voters.
Indicated political rebellion against President by labeling noble experiment a failure, by joining Hearst in hooting at foreign "entanglements." M. B. PETTUS
Tacoma Daily Ledger Tacoma, Wash.
Accurate, Succinct Sirs:.
I wish ... to congratulate you on the accurate and succinct description of my television landing system.
JOHN HAYS HAMMOND, JR. Gloucester, Mass.
Boowoo & Ubum
Sirs:
Having just returned from a trip into the Siam jungles where I was commissioned to remain until I had found another twin, white elephant or Cardiff giant for the Dingling Shows, I am engrossed by the accumulated issues of TIME, acutely so in your article headed ''Ferocious Minnows" (June 30) and in Mr. Swift's letter (July 14).
Before leaving there I fished the upper Menam, the regal preserve to which I had been granted piscary. It was the opening day of the trouting season, April 1. Ignorant of preferences, I first tried a flaming Ibis. The fly had no sooner touched the water than it was taken greedily. Instead of rushing here and there to escape in the manner of our salmo jontinalis, the strange fish shook the fly and growled as savagely as a mad bulldog. My left thumb will always remain minus a piece bitten out with its prognathous jaws. The chamberlain, Whah Tanahs, who kindly acted as my guide, informed me that it was a fine specimen of the sapo, called the Battling Fish of Bangkok, though none is to be found within 100 miles from the Siam capital.
The name sapo is due to a peculiar habit of the male. When the female is ready to spawn he locates a quillai tree and, flipping himself into an overhanging branch, tears off a twig and drops back into the water with it. The inner bark is alkaline. This he chews into a thick soapy pulp which he plugs temporarily into the bank at the water line. Noting the first convulsions of his bride, he takes a chew from the depository and, his gill-covers bulging with thick lather, he bathes an extruded egg with milt: then, taking it between his teeth as harmlessly as a cat lugs a wandering kitten back to coverture, he blows a dense soap bubble round it and sets it afloat, usually in an eddy close to shore. Under the heat of the equatorial sun, rolling about in its aqueous cradle, distasteful alike to predatory waterfowl and other amphibia, the bubble skin hardens to the consistency and appearance of the coat that immediately surrounds the albumen of a pullet egg, and in about ten days the fully-formed fish emerges from its shell into its natural ambient. Each of the invariable 23 eggs is treated with similar devotion. Natives are accustomed to the phosphorescent glow of these living balls as they quietly loll or gaily dance in the moonlight on the surface of the bewitching Menam, but to me the scene that night was as uncanny as being confronted suddenly at a nocturnal hour in the Cimmerian depths of a forest by a stark tree aglow with deer-fire. Whah Tanahs told me of the famous pair of sapos in the royal palace. He brings them from separate quarters each evening and places them in an oval bowl of alabaster beside the King's couch for his entertainment. Boowoo, the female, having passed her climacteric, maliciously resents the lovemaking of Ubum, equally old but still of undiminished ardor, he trying only to protect his body against her vixenish assaults. ... If she can once secure a firm hold on his anal fin she may rip it out forward . . . and pass the rest of her life in undisturbed tranquillity. Now they lead a cat-and-dog life, Stimulating in the harassed life of the King because of his fellow feeling for poor Ubum. It was impossible for me to keep pace with the additional lore of my genial informant--hair displacing scales on aged fish, the spinning of a fine yarn from the undigested fibre of the quillai tree, squeezed from the sapo like fishing-gut from silk worms--even by swift thinking. EUGENE E. SLOCUM* Glen Ridge, N. J.
"University of Philadelphia"
Sirs:
In your issue of July 7, p. 24, you say, relative to the honorary degrees of Vittorio Emanuele HI, "Hon. Doctor of Laws (University of Philadelphia)". Will you kindly inform me just where the University of Philadelphia is located?
It may be that your worthy scribe refers to the University of Pennsylvania, which at its inception in 1740 was called ''The Charity School" and which was (in 1749) designated as "The Publick Academy in the City of Philadelphia." Mayhaps you will be interested in knowing that the first university in this country was the University of Pennsylvania, which assumed this cognomen in 1790.
ROBERT S. HOLZMAN, '29
New York, N. Y.
To a credulous researcher, a reprimand for copying "University of Philadelphia" out of the Almanack de Gotha. University of Pennsylvania gave King Vittorio Emanuele III his LL.D. in 1906.--ED. Dreadful Bears Sirs: Your leading article under "Animals," p. 52, issue of June 30, carries the usual misconceptions common to bear protectionists. Grizzly bears are not so infrequent along the Continental Divide as the article implies. In this comparatively small area of Northwest Montana, several are killed yearly, several more are observed. Would that the killing continue until no more were observed! Stewart Edward White may be right in the assertion--"correct procedure is to lie still. The bear will cuff and bite only as long as his victim resists." Does Mr. White recommend the same behavior concerning the thief and marauder of the genus homo? To the local people the cases are parallel. The much maligned sheepherder has guts enough to "resist" the bear which, in giving expression to a capricious mood, slaps to death members of his flock. .... I have had close personal meetings with four mature grizzlies and have had the nonenviable experience of '.ying in the prone position, "unresisting"' but not in a faint, while a wounded grizzly crunched my bones. It is my observation and belief that a grizzly, if physically able, will attack any living thing that molests it or interferes with its routine activities. As regards the tragedy of John Thayer, there are few men who are not "green to the beasts"; few who are not "green" to their tremendous strength, energy, vitality; few who would not have done as did John Thayer who in all probability stood "stock-still and unresisting" because of a paralyzing fright at the sight of the maddened onrushing beast--than which there is no more horrible sight in America's fields or forests. R. W. BILLINGS
Libby, Mont. Tycho Brahe
Sirs:
In your article on the Last of the Brahes in the June 30 issue you made no mention whatsoever of Tycho (Brahe) who was a far greater man than any of the swordwielding Brahes, for it was Tycho's important data which made possible Kepler's discoveries, which made possible Newton's laws, which made possible Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
CHARLES C. BILODEAU
Augusta, Me.
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), astronomer, was allowed, when he was 25, to install a laboratory in his uncle's castle of Herritzvad. There he discovered a "new star." His family relations were strained by his marriage to a peasant girl. He traveled under royal patronage in Germany, Italy, Denmark. Rudolph II of Austria bestowed upon him a castle and fief in Prague, where he was joined by Kepler in his researches. When Tycho died in 1601, Kepler carefully edited his principal work, incorporated Tycho's Table of 777 fixed stars into his later (1627) "Rudolphine Tables."--ED. Uphill Hundred Sirs:
I hope Tolan's record for an "uphill hundred" (TIME, July 14) will be officially accepted. Should a man be barred from heaven for a work of supererogation? That the uphill hundred was such a work I believe you must concede when you reflect that while "one's feet would strike upsloping ground more quickly than level," they would leave it less quickly. To put it another way, while on a track sloping slightly upward the ground in front is nearer the point where a runner's legs join his body, the ground behind is farther from it. And picking up one's feet is harder work than putting them down.
I will agree with TIME that "the gravity factor [is | negligible" if TIME will agree with me that so are the other factors involved in this speculation.
CHARLES V. PRICE
Charleston, W. Va. Agreed.--ED. Angel-Cake
Sirs:
Now comes my chance to get into this new game of showing up TIME errors.
Chicago Dictionary, in June 14 issue, gives the birth of Angel-Cake as 1897.
I was in London in July 1891, and bought Angel-Cake in a shop where American cake and chewing gum were sold. With each slice of Angel-Cake one received the receipt for making it.
(Mrs.) LILLA L. PARKS
Watertown, Wis.
*Author of Ye Gods Little Fishes (Dodd. Mead, $2.50).
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