Expeditions

Last week's news of expeditions in the name of science, included the following:

Mrs. Delia J. Denning Akeley, first wife of the late Carl Ethan Akeley, sailed from Manhattan for a solitary year among Belgian Congo pigmies. Akeley introduced her to Africa in 1905. She helped him at his kills and photography. After their divorce in 1923 she spent three months studying pigmies. Her present expedition, on which she will have no civilized companion, is to expand those studies. Just before sailing, she said: "I hate and dread the loneliness of it, and I'm afraid, too. Of course, I'm afraid. There's plenty to be afraid of. If I should do something the pigmies didn't like, they could do away with me in short order and disappear from the place, and no one would ever know what had happened to me. But, it's my work, and that's more important to me than anything else."

Col. Theodore Roosevelt reached Tokyo, returning leisurely from hunting in Central Asia to take his post as Governor of Porto Rico.

Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd in Antarctica received a plea from the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Manhattan to name some Antarctic place after Poet Poe. Wirelessed serious-minded Explorer Byrd: "Will name something after Poe if there is anything left after the long list I now have. It is essential for me to remember first the members of the expedition and others who have made it possible. Kind regards." The expedition began experiments with Westinghouse's East Pittsburgh radio station KDKA to determine the variations in long distance broadcasting. They suspect that the theoretical Heaviside layer comes close to the earth's surface at the Poles.

Herbert Spencer Dickey went up the Orinoco River for the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Last week he returned to Manhattan, unwilling to talk about his "dismal failure." The Venezuelan Government did not supply him with a promised boat. The old boat he bought was wrecked. The only unusual thing which he happened upon was a rarely seen tribe of Piarroas Indians. He considers them the most timid people in the world. They fear animals, fish, even small birds. Nor will they eat them. Their food consists of bread made from roots, and a diet of worms, ants, maggots.

Llewellyn Williams, Field Museum botanist on the Amazon, reported finding a tree which "contains in its bark a sweet edible resin with the consistency of real sugar." Another tree "excretes an oily substance which in appearance, taste, consistency and other properties is a close affinity to the lard rendered from animal fats."

Far up a north branch of the Amazon, T. Tozzi Calvo, Brazilian explorer, found rock inscriptions which resembled Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek characters.

"The Arctic is attractive in many ways, but not this place. All's well," radioed Donald Baxter Macmillan from the east coast of Baffin Island, where his schooner Bowdoin was icelocked for a fortnight. If he can get out of the icepack he will return to the U. S. at once and prepare for his 1930 expedition to the same region. On that trip he will use airplanes to study the Baffin Island icecap, to search for interior lakes, for mineral deposits.