Fortunes in Faces

At Ithaca, N. Y., 253 men and 350 women scanned twelve photographs given them by Dr. Richard S. Uhrbrock, assistant professor of Rural Education, lecturer in Cornell University's course on Hotel Administration. The pictures were faces of twelve men who had taken the Thorndike intelligence test. Six had scored high, six had scored low. The 603 scanners carefully examined each face, guessed at cranial capacities, studied brightness of eye, firmness of mouth, tried to separate the stupid from the brilliant. Two photographs they observed in particular. From one smirked a dull, stupid face with drooping lips and averted, timid eyes. Surely, said most of the examiners, this man must be a moron. In the other was a man with a straight glance, a high forehead, a pleasant expression. Here, said the examiners, was kin of genius.

Last week, thin, scant-haired; Dr. Uhrbrock made known the guesses of his 603 scrutators. Most of them had gone far astray. Some 75% of the men and 81% of the women picked the owner of the "moron" face for a stupid oaf. Yet he had scored high in the Thorndike test. The pleasant-faced man was a dullard, had scored low in the test. He was adjudged acute by 70% of the men, 78% of the women.

Querist Uhrbrock's conclusions: Employers cannot estimate the intelligence of job-seekers from photographs. Many a stupid employe there must be, whose face is his fortune.

Rurals Roused

"The city can hold a nine months school each year while the average for the rural district is seven. There is 7.7% illiteracy in rural districts and 4.4 in the city. The difference in health defects is startling. Eye defects: rural 23%, city 12. Defective teeth: rural 48%, city 33. Only 25.7% of the rural children 15 to 18 years of age are in high school as compared with 71.1% in the city."

Thus gloomily intoned James William Crabtree, secretary of the National Education Association, to a little crowd of Nebraska farmers gathered last week in a grove, across the road from a one-room schoolhouse, the Fairview District School, near Elmwood. The occasion: the school was 50 years old. Fifty years ago Educator Crabtree punched cattle in the dusty buffalo-grass outside the grove; 46 years ago he caned culprits, taught lessons in the schoolhouse.

Important at the gathering were 20 schoolmasters and schoolmarms, Secretary Crabtree's predecessors and successors. Former dunces and scholars of Teacher Crabtree heard him urge them to combine to demand from Federal and State legislators educational facilities equal to those of city schools, just as they are combining to merchandise their produce. They were advised to better their schools, make the farm-bred healthy and wise, keep them on the farm.

Further saddening his audience, Mr. Crabtree went on: "Chain stores and mail order houses pick up profits in villages and country places to be taxed at the headquarters office in a far away place. ... In Iowa there is an average of 200 boys and girls per county leaving the country for the city each year. This means that the total investment (per county) of $800,000 (the cost of their education to the age of 18) ... is taken out never to be returned. . . . Those gigantic mergers in industry and finance . . . sap the farm . . . produce scores of new millionaires each year."

Yale Telephones

P: Each year on "Tap Day" at Yale (third Thursday in May) four telephone lines are laid from the "tombs" of the four senior societies to four unknown rooms on the "old campus" of Yale College so that potentates in the "tombs" may know how successfully the tapping is going for their society. Under the elms, 60 desired men are chosen, the telephones removed, the tomb-to-room connections severed.

P: Unless he be a manager of a major sport, or hold an important office on a publication, no undergraduate may have a telephone in his dormitory room. To the few Yale telephone owners, a telephone is said to be a nuisance. Yalemen who have them are expected to take messages for other Yalemen, send telegrams, seek from professors forgotten assignments. C. Last week from New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. came more Yale telephone news. The publicity department had found that undergraduates at New Haven telephone more per capita than any other group of people in Connecticut. During the academic year they make some 4,600 calls a week, most of which are handled on Friday and Saturday.

P: Curious is the fact that the first commercial telephone exchange was opened at New Haven Jan. 28, 1878; more curious that an original subscriber, the Yale Daily News, began publication on that same day.

P: Yale University owned last year 5,012 shares of American Telephone & Telegraph Co. stock.