Plutonic Laboratories

Harvard's peripatetic Harlow Shapley (TIME, Dec. 2) addressed the American Geographical Society in Manhattan last week. Usually he has his keen intelligence among the stars. For last week's occasion he directed it into the earth. He proposed, as has many another with less public attention, to establish scientific laboratories deep beneath the land surface. The deepest man-made hole in the world is in Orange County, Cal., 8,201 ft. deep. The deepest mine in the world is St. John del Rey in the stage of Minas Geraes, Brazil, about 7,200 ft. down, where toiling men blast gold ore from the hot rock walls.

At such depths, or deeper, Dr. Shapley would have his plutonic laboratories. Ph. D. moles would record the pulsations of the earth's crust which, according to one theory, is as rigid as steel and as elas- tic, rather than viscous, like stiff pitch. They would verify the hypothesized drift of North America from Europe and South America from Africa. (As can be seen on a globe, the continents would roughly fit together.) Such scientific gnomes might be able to determine the existence of an interstellar ether. They could certainly measure the relation of earth heat to earth depth. They might learn the source of that heat, might learn the nature of radio-activity in rocks, might learn the characteristics of earthquakes, might learn. . . .

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