Philosophers in Philadelphia

Neat little trucks from Holland's, locally famed Negro caterer, pulled up at the cellar door of the American Philosophical Society's Georgian brick building on Philadelphia's Independence Square last week, disgorging trays of fried oysters, crab cutlets, apple salad and fancy cakes. To sleepy loungers in the Square this was a sure sign that the Philosophical Society, oldest and one of the richest of U. S. scientific bodies, was holding its spring meeting.

To the Society's well-fed members, Dr. Alexis Carrel described the latest accomplishments of the "perfusion pump" designed with his help by Colonel Charles Lindbergh (TIME, Feb. 24, 1936) in which dozens of different organs have now been kept alive, including thyroids, parathyroids, nerve ganglions, salivary and mammary glands, livers, spleens, kidneys, lungs, and even cancerous tumors. Harvard's Harlow Shapley described four new swarms of star-galaxies or island universes, each galaxy containing billions of stars--a discovery which may bear on the agitated question of whether the all-embracing Universe is expanding or not. Grey old Ernest W. Brown, professor emeritus of mathematics at Yale and a famed authority on the moon, who complacently smoked a pipe in violation of the Society's house rules, reported that the measurements of lunar motion which he started making a half-century ago have recently been rechecked with the help of modern calculating machines. Dr. Brown remarked with evident amusement that only two extremely slight errors had been found, both amounting to less than 1/100 of a second of arc on the curve of the sky.

Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, 69, famed anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution, believes that as a person gets older his skull gets bigger, because of increasing brain size--at least if the person is intellectually active. He got one of his first confirmations of this theory from British Archeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, 80. Last week he reported receiving word of increasing head size from 58 professors, lawyers, ministers, financiers and writers, including three women.

Small, deep-voiced Dr. Herbert Fox, comparative pathologist of the University of Pennsylvania, studied the incidence of arthritis in animals at the Philadelphia Zoo, found this joint disease in the front legs of hyenas and leopards, the hind legs of antelope, deer and wild pigs, the necks and hands of gorillas. He concluded that in mammals (including man) the parts put to most strenuous use are the most susceptible to arthritis.

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