"Oh, God, Why Live"

In the southwestern South Dakota knot of mountains called the Black Hills are the richest U. S. gold mines, the camp where President Coolidge said "I do not choose to run," the bowl-like mountain valley out of which Major Albert William Stevens sailed his stratosphere balloon in 1935, the outstanding granite mountain whose top Sculptor Gutzon Borglum is blasting into the shape of Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's and Roosevelt's heads, the Wind Cave National Monument whose ten underground square miles have never been well explored, and the Fossil Cycad National Monument whose 360 acres preserve trees petrified 120,000,000 years ago.

Last week the discoverer of that petrified forest, Yale's merry old paleobotanist, George Reber Wieland, was engaged in a public quarrel with Secretary of the Interior Ickes, whose duty it is to tend to national monuments. Professor Wieland wants Secretary Ickes to spend $95,000 cleaning up the petrified forest and making it easy for paleobotanists to get to. He thinks he has a right to get that done because, besides discovering the forest, he took title to it as a homesteader and then gave it back to the Government for nothing.

Having his head full of many other things, including a sewage disposal plant on the Potomac, Secretary Ickes had his publicity-wise Personal Assistant Harry Slattery write this refusal to Paleobotanist Wieland: ". . . The subject of fossil cycads does not have a broad appeal. . . . The story can be effectively told by a display which, for the present at least, can be housed in the administration building at Wind Cave National Monument, 22 miles distant. . . ."

A great good friend of the late Andrew Carnegie whom he resembles,* Professor Wieland last week retorted warmly in the columns of Science that Fossil Cycad National Monument "has no more to do with speleology [cave lore] than the snowcap of Kilimanjaro. It must have been an oversight on the part of nature to put so much scientific clarity and loveliness only 22 miles from a cavern in a gulch and now surrounded by a sort of caravansary. That is not what the student of evolution exactly wishes to see first. . . . Will the 'public' be as dumb tomorrow as it is today?"

Not content with this caustic comment. Professor Wieland promptly fired the following original composition at Mr. Ickes:

Oh, God, why live, to breathe a prescribed and rationed air!--All free

Opinion, all interchange of vigorous thought, suffocated

By the poisonous motor-exhaust of motor minds!

Passion regimented; curiosity regimented; endeavor regimented;

Culture, and grace, and all the things I cared for

Equally divided among the mob, and sauced to their taste!

* Carnegie who was bald and Professor Wieland who (at 72) is not once played a joke of mistaken identity on the Carnegie barber who for weeks thereafter boasted that his massages and lotions had made hair grow again on the Carnegie pate.

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