Holiday Meetings

Last week was flood season for scientific conventions, conferences, symposia, and the professors attended them well.

AT NASHVILLE, TENN.

Greatest meeting was that of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Nashville, Tenn. Thither journeyed some 3,000 scientists. They listened to nimble discussions on mathematics, physics, meteorology, zoology, geography, botony, entomology.

Physical Theories. "A physical theory does not represent what we might call a real truth. A physical theory is a collection of fundamental hypotheses and general laws, which may be used to deduce particular laws that can be applied to concrete facts. Physical theories are useful, if they explain a large number of facts in simple ways, and if they furnish definitions of terms and a nomenclature to be used in describing phenomena. Physical theories are tools and not creeds, but one is at liberty to believe they represent reality, if one wants to. The belief in a physical theory, however, is a similar process of thought to the belief in religious tenets. The greater the number of useful physical theories that are proposed, the greater the number of good tools we shall have at our disposal, to use in discovering the real truth about the way in which nature acts; for it is the way in which nature acts that is the prime object of physical research. The multiplicity of theories in physics to-day really represents a healthy growth." -- Professor William Duane of Harvard.

Group Thinking. A psychological query has been: Which can think with greater swiftness and accuracy--a group of men or an individual? Applied to business affairs the query is: Can a board of directors or a president best manage a company? Professor Goodwin Barbour Watson of Columbia University sought a solution by testing smart Columbia students. To each he gave a nine-letter word (as neurotics, education, secondary, universal), and told him to write out as many three-letter words as he could devise from the letters in the long word. After ten minutes Professor Watson called time. The Poorest individual record was 18 three-letter words, the best 49, and the average 32. Then the professor offered similar words to groups, telling the members of the groups to shout out the three-letter words as they constructed them. The average group record for ten minutes community-thinking was practically 75 words, more than twice the individual record. Therefore, reasoned Profesor Watson, for at least simple problems group thinking is better than individual thinking.

Blindfolded Spiraling. Professor Asa Arthur Schaeffer of the University of Kansas blindfolded persons and set them walking on a level patch of ground. Invariably they walked straight ahead for 50 or 100 steps, then they began curving their paths into great spirals, which at first were 60 to 180 feet in diameter and then as the promenading continued gradually decreased to curves 15 to 18 feet in diameter. The same blindfolded spiraling occurred whether the promenaders walked on prairies, race tracks, or ice. It occurred when people swam blindfolded, and when, blindfolded, they drove automoblles. Skin & Feathers. Dr. Charles Haskell Danforth of Stanford University, grafted on a Plymouth Rock chick a patch of skin from a White Leghorn chick. The feathers that grew on the patched part of the Plymouth Rock were Leghorn feathers. Dr. Danforth decided that skin alone and not general constitution was the determining factor in feather-making. However glandular secretions have some effect. The Plymouth Rock hen on which he grafted skin of a Leghorn cock developed Leghorn hen feathers.

Electron Waves. One of the most important as well as abstruse experiments of the year, reported at those Nashville meetings, was conducted by Dr. Clinton Joseph Davisson of the Bell Telephone laboratories. Professor Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago, who recently received the Nobel Prize for Physics (TIME, Nov. 21) had described x-rays as moving like corpuscles or bullets. This supports the quantum theory of matter, i. e. that all matter is made up of rapidly moving but separate particles. And it supported a theory that electrons popped away from hot objects, such as filaments in an incandescent lamp or vacuum tube, in a straight line. Dr. Davisson has just discovered that those electrons leave their parent body in radiating waves as well as in separate particles.

Dinosaurian Pains. Enlarged joints and diseased bones indicate that paleolithic animals suffered from toothache, rheumatism, tuberculosis and other diseases still current. Said Dr. Arthur Sterry Coggeshall, chief paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, to illustrate the apathy of the dinosaurs: "His brain [a dinosaur's] was about the size of a man's thumb--in fact the telegraph system of his great body was so impotent that if somebody had stepped on his tail his brain, 80 feet from the injured member, would never have received the message."

Anthropology & Medicine. Let doctors consult with anthropologists for light on human physical evolution, for data on human variation and for the furnishing of normal standards, said Dr. Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian institution. "The vast collection of both normal and pathological material in our Osteological, brain, and other collections is used nowhere near as much as it should be by the medical man and the surgeon. . . . [Physical anthropology shows for example] that the normal stature of an adult American male is not 5 feet 7 1/2 inches, but anywhere between, say, 5 ft. 4 in., and 6 ft. 3 in. The normal male pulse is not invariably 71.5, but ranges between 66 and 78 per minute. The normal pelvis, head, and any other part or organ, may show as much as 10 to 16% normal variation in size, with a considerable variation in form. The 'normal' course of lobar pneumonia or any other affection is not 'just so,' but will oscillate between such and such limits."

According to Dr. Hrdlicka the only U. S. medical schools offering courses in anthropology are those of Johns Hopkins, Harvard University of Virginia, Western Reserve, Washington University of St. Louis, Universities of Chicago and Stanford.

Tall & Short People. The smallest people in the world are the Negrillos of central Africa and the Aymaras of central South Africa. Almost as short are the Eskimos, Lapps and northern Siberians. They all lack one thing--abundant food. The tallest peoples live along the northern European coasts, along the Baltic, in western Asia, eastern Africa and in the temperate zones of North & South America. Their common possession is abundant food. However there are short peoples (Japanese, Mediterraneans, Central Americans, Fuegians, Malays and southern Asiatics) who have descended from taller stocks and who have an adequate food supply. Because they all live close to the oceans, Professor Robert Bennett Bean of the University of Virginia reasons: "Sea areas and probably sea foods have an influence in reducing the stature by increasing the iodine intake. [The thyroid gland in the neck utilizes the iodine and controls bodily growth.] . . . Looked at in its broadest sense, environment molds the individual, selection retains the fittest under different environments and heredity carries on the results."

Genetics. President Clarence Cook Little of the University of Michigan advised biological investigators to turn more and more from their habitual and comparatively easy study of insects to the study of mammals. There are, said he, at least five great divisions of genetic problems which are capable of successful investigation in laboratory mammals, viz., the genetic bases for size & growth, fertility & sterility, susceptibility or resistance to disease, lethal action of genes during development, and psychological differences. Studying those fields, investigators might learn the possibility of controlling the ratio between the sexes, of developing resistance to infectious diseases and elimination of hereditary defects, of gaining new light on the inheritance of mental characteristics.

Having said this and having attended several other of the Nashville talks, President Little then took a train for Battle Creek, Mich., where he presided over the Third Race Betterment Conference (see col. 2).

Evolution. Three speakers, although guests in Tennessee, spoke their minds on evolution.

Said Dr. Arthur Amos Noyes, director of the Gates Chemical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: "While even less can be said today of the processes by which evolution takes place than was thought to be known fifty years ago, the fact that evolution has been going on and that many animal types have gone through definite stages of development can only be doubted by an individual who, like an ostrich, buries his head in the sand out of a vague dread that he may see something shocking.

"These advances in science have greatly influenced the philosophic and religious thinking of the scientific man, for it is a great mistake to think the tendency of advancing science is toward materialism. Just the opposite. The repeated discoveries of new and unexpected types of phenomena in the physical world make us realize more than ever the limitations of our understanding and lead us to feel with the poet that 'As knowledge grows, from more to more will reverence in us dwell.' "

Dr. William, Emerson Ritter, University of California zoologist and president of Science Service, declared: "When the idea of emergence is applied to racial as well as to individual development, there is left no trace of doubt about the adequacy of the creative power of the natural order to produce man, not only with all his physical, but with all his spiritual attributes."

And Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, added: "This is the doctrine of evolution: that the universe is orderly in time as well as in space. It is naive and provincial to think of evolution as a term applicable only to changes in living organisms. It applies equally to stars and systems of stars, to the earth, to the creatures living on the earth, to the mind of man. Sometimes these changes will be toward what we regard as perfection; sometimes in the opposite direction, but always orderly. Is there anything in this to corrupt the mind of youth?

"My opinion is that the religions of men, their yearnings for higher things, differ as much as their theologies differ. If this conclusion is correct, anything that modifies man modifies his theology."

Officers. As many scientific bodies do, the American Association for the Advancement of Science elects a president a year before he is to take office. Thus Dr. Arthur Amos Noyes of the California Institute of Technology who presided over last week's sessions was elected a year ago. And Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was made president-elect last week, takes office twelve months hence. Dr. Osborn is president of the American Museum of Natural History.

AT BATTLE CREEK, MICH.

Race Betterment. From Nashville, President Clarence Cook Little of the University of Michigan and many another took train for Battle Creek, Mich., where, as guests of bustling Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, they attended the Third Race Betterment Conference. Dr. Little presided over the informal discourses of more than 50 men and women who sought less to present new facts in genetics or any other science than to show how the special sciences might apply to the problems of race improvement.

AT COLUMBUS, OHIO

Psychologists. It was at the 36th annual meeting of the American Psychology Association and Dr. Karl Spencer Lashley of the Chicago Institute of Juvenile Research was speaking. After he had taught rats to work out certain problems, he said, he cut away portions of their brains. Although he removed from 1% to 81% of a brain the rats still were able to solve problems, only with the greater loss of brain they thought more slowly. Dr. Lashley reasoned that no one section of the brain controls mental functions, such as ability to learn or retain knowledge. He did not controvert the fact that different portions of the brain do control muscular action in different parts of the body.

Professor Edwin Garrigues Boring of Harvard was elected president of the American Psychology Association.

Organic Chemists. At Columbus also met the National Organic Chemistry Symposium and discussed the year's developments in the field of chemistry.

AT CINCINNATI, OHIO

Philologists. Every year the American Philological Association ceases its technical discussions of words to hear a pert comment on slang. Last week Professor Edward Howard Sturtevant of Yale was the commentator. Said he: "My complaint about slang is that it wears out too soon and therefore can have no meaning in the future. I can imagine nothing more shocking than to hear someone use a slang expression current ten years ago, such as '23 skidoo' or 'you're off your base.' But at first coining of such an expression, an idea is conveyed quickly and in a more satisfying manner than in the king's own English."

Archeologists. It was pleasant for the Archeological Institute of America to hear that the University of Cincinnati digging expedition to Nemea* in Greece, had successfully completed its excavation work. Prize discoveries were an adyton or secret underground chamber to which only priests had been privy, and the most complete Greek gymnasium & bath heretofore seen. Director John Garstang of the Palestine Government department of antiquities described the translating of 600 (of 20,000) baked brick records made by Hittites. The records interlock prettily with those of Greece, Babylon and Egypt.

Also in Cincinnati met the College Art Association of America, the Linguistic Society of America, the National Association of Teachers of Speech, the American Association of University Professors.

AT NEW HAVEN, CONN.

Moon &Clocks. The American Astronomical Association at New Haven examined a classification of the spectra of 225,000 stars and heard expounded a hypothesis of stellar atmosphere. Dr. Herbert Rollo Morgan of the Naval Observatory in Washington contributed some nice observations he had made on how clocks run during different phases of the moon. When the moon is in the west clocks run slower and one part of the day is a trifle longer than another--one five hundredth of a second longer.

Sun & Rabbits. Nor was there levity in the observation of Dr. Ralph Emerson De Lury of Ottawa--that in years when the sun spots were few, rabbits bred more plentifully. Trapping records of the Hudson's Bay Company supported his contention.

AND ELSEWHERE

At Cleveland met the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, the Mineralogical Society of America and the Society of Economic Geologists.

At Andover, N. H., met the American Anthropological Association.

* Where Hercules slew the mythical Nemean lion.