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American Farm Bureau Federation on the day before his Message was read. Secretary of Agriculture Jardine issued a statement that, having got the co-operatives' aid bill behind him, he was ready to turn his attention to the surplus problem. He is calling conferences of all sorts of interested groups.

I do not suppose that the convictions of the Administration have changed a hair's breadth. I do suppose that the political situation grew so alarming, the revolt of the Middle West and the West so imminent, that concession had to be made, and that speedily. I suppose that Mr. Jardine is diligently trying, with the support of the President, to arrive at some basis for a surplus disposition bill

that will accomplish something beneficial to farmers without throwing our economic machinery out of gear. I do not suppose any bill that the conscience of the Administration-a conscience that must necessarily have one subconscious eye on the manufacturer-can approve will satisfy the advocates of Government price fixing and the like. I suppose that monkey-wrenches are going to be fed into the Congressional thresher and that broken teeth will whizz and fly and hurt a lot of people. I suppose the Administration will be able to hold off anything in the nature of Government price fixing, but I do not suppose that Calvin Coolidge will ever again have the solid support that he once had from the West and

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Of What Is Science Thinking?

Correspondence from the recent Kansas City meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

NCE a year, in some large center, several thousands of American scientists gather in order to read papers describing their researches, to listen to lectures by one another, and, equally important, to rub shoulders, hobnob about science, and thus maintain a mutual acquaintance. This constitutes the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a body of some sixteen thousand men and women representing all branches of science.

Thus the annual meeting of all these people who have widely varied interests in science is a kind of clearing-house for the current advances in research. It is also a great mouthpiece through which the several sciences may make known to the public what they have been doing

during the year past-what researches have been attempted, what results accomplished. For to-day the scientist clearly realizes that the future of science is in the hands of the public, which furnishes the funds whereby his research may be performed.

Always, or nearly always, the public obtains its strongest impressions of the mportant meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Scince from the newspapers, and in the last nalysis the only kind of news reports which may be consistently marketed to he greatest number of newspapers are

By ALBERT G. INGALLS

the kind which the masses of their readers will read and understand. Thus, while we have had excellent popular and semi-popular newspaper accounts of these great scientific gatherings, notably from such papers as the New York "Times" and the Kansas City "Star," to many editors it has evidently seemed impossible or impracticable to present a serious and accurate depiction of what our scientists are doing and saying, and, in short, to give a clear idea of what they are really like.

In many cases of reporting, the necessary compromise between the abstruseness of the scientific account and the popular report, there has been an illconceived effort to revert to the use of humor. Humor, however, does not of itself leaven the abstruseness of science. The result has undoubtedly been to leave The result has undoubtedly been to leave in at least the less appreciative and less understanding majority of lay minds the general impression that scientists are a peculiar kind of people who spend their time searching for the bizarre, the paradoxical, the "stunty," and even the sensational aspects of their work.

Thus we might pick up our morning paper and read something like this: "Florida real estate will soon become even more valuable than that of Manhattan if the predicted return of the Glacial Period drives mankind out of the North, crowding millions into the uninvaded

portions of the country. This is the purport of an address delivered to-day at Omaha before the American Association for the Advancement of Science by Professor Sirius Orion, noted geologist and cosmologist. The professor's hearers were noticeably perturbed until near the close of his address, when he explained that he was using the word 'soon' in its geological sense, and that if the ice mantle should return it would not push our descendants southward for another 20,000 years."

Noticeably, however, as mentioned above, the newspapers are gaining a clearer insight into the nature and significance of science to civilization, and some of them are treating it seriously as well as with great popular interest.

THI
THIS year the American Association—

the entire name is more than a mouthful-held its meeting in Kansas City, and it was therefore attended mostly by scientists from the Middle West and West rather than from the East. In this space it will prove impossible to summarize even a fraction of the interesting papers delivered, nor is this desirable, since at such a meeting there are always a few addresses that stand far above the rest in interest or in signifi

cance.

Possibly the most outstanding aspect of the Kansas City meeting, as your cor

(C) Keystone

Michael I. Pupin, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

respondent saw it, was the realization that the support of future science depends on the proper sort of publicity which present-day science receives, and also that if scientists are to perform their labors efficiently they must be relieved from the petty worries of maintaining or attempting to maintain a growing family on a meager stipend of two or three thousand dollars a year.

There was manifest at Kansas City a feeling among scientists that science has been .too unimaginative, too specialized, too narrow in its way, and that its daily struggles after truth are, or ought to be, consciously directed towards some greater end. Without doubt this feeling reflects the surprise of scientific men following the Dayton, Tennessee, evolution trial-surprise that the intentions of science have not been understood by the world at large; it also takes in the feeling that many of the lesser scientific men have remained limited in vision and depth-that they do not see that science is only a means to living.

A

MONG purely scientific matters dealt

with at Kansas City the most outstanding was the continuation of the friendly struggle that is now going on between two great concepts-Einsteinism, as exemplified by the abandonment of the theory of the ether of space, and the older concept of the ether which Einsteinism would displace. This struggle was brought to a head by Professor Dayton C. Miller, of the Case School of Applied Science (Cleveland), who explained in careful detail his more recent experiments, which indicate that the ether does

in fact exist and that we are swimming in a sea of it. Professor Miller's careful research has thrown a monkey-wrench into the Einstein wheel, although it has far from discouraged the enthusiastic exponents of Einsteinism.

Within the past three or four years, and especially within about one year, three strong, empirical vindications of relativity have been reached by research. The first was the bending of rays of light which pass close to the sun. This has been studied by Dr. Charles E. St. John, of the Mount Wilson Observatory, in California, who explained his work at the Kansas City meeting, and who, by the way, was photographed by a humorous press correspondent while having a prearranged argument with Professor Miller (N. E. A.)-an incident, by the way, which points out that in most cases the battles between great opposing scientific concepts are only between the concepts themselves, and not between their respective proponents. Even where their beliefs clash, a remarkably fine fellowship exists between scientific men the country over; in fact, the chief urge in the minds of many of them to attend the annual meetings of the American Association is for the expression of that spirit.

A second vindication of the Einstein theory is the manner in which light coming to us from a peculiar and extremely dense or "heavy" star called the "Companion of Sirius" is affected, as discovered by Dr. Adams, of the Mount Wilson Observatory; while the third substantiation was the celebrated pipe experiment conducted at Chicago by two physicists, Professors Michelson and Gale. This was explained in a previous issue of The Outlook.

Thus, agreeing with Einstein, many scientists have thrown out the ether of space, and the several previous attempts of Professor Miller to counter this tendency by explaining his experiments which seem to demonstrate the existence of the ether had previously been more or less passed over, as if resulting from some mistake in technic or from some systematic error. Professor Miller therefore reperformed his experiments on a greater scale, making during the past year more than one hundred thousand observations, all of which have demonstrated the existence of the ether as an actual thing, and all of which were consistent with one another in showing that the earth, and indeed the entire solar system, is moving through it in the direction of the constellation of the Dragon at the rate of about 125 miles a second. This motion, or drift, through the ether appears to be accelerated when we are on the advanc

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J. McKeen Cattell, retiring President of the Association

ing side of the earth, and retarded wh we are on the retreating side. It vari throughout the day in a consistent ma ner, also at various seasons when th earth moves in different parts of its orb with respect to the general motion t wards Draco. The final proof of th existence of an objective ether wou have the effect of knocking an importa prop from under the Einstein theor Most scientists are strongly actuated b the true scientific spirit-that is, th spirit of search for the truth. Dr. R.. Millikan, foremost American atom physicist, explained at the Kansas Cit meeting that the only people who kno they are right are the atheists and th Fundamentalists. The scientific min never crystallizes, and it is unlikely tha science will ever settle down to a state established rest. It may therefore be long time before the Einstein theory either established or disproved.

Professor William MacDonald, his torian, of Yale, in addressing the Com mittee of One Hundred on Scientifi Research, pointed out that our force o pure science workers was rapidly bein depleted by large companies and labora tories engaged in applied science, whic offer far larger salaries than these me could earn as professors. This is in lin with the recent utterances of Secretary Hoover, who clearly sees that all ou material progress depends on the basic underlying stratum of research in pure science. In a different way, Dr. R. A Millikan pointed out the same thing by showing that our entire mechanical cul ture rests squarely on the discovery made by Galileo that the natural state of mat

ter was not simply that of rest, as had been taught by Aristotle and erroneously believed by the whole world for two

thousand years.

From this discovery, simple as it sounds, our entire science of mechanics took root and the mechanical or industrial revolution finally resulted.

Our leading scientists are at present seriously concerned with the important obligation which rests upon them, to use their influence to guide the paths of the future in such a way that no event or accident of history shall injure the future health of this invaluable growth called science. It is such problems as this,

rather than the grist of new knowledge of the second order of importance, which largely occupies the thoughts of the leaders of the American Association when they gather in conclave during the annual meetings.

A way must be found to keep uncovering more Galileos.

B

Yale's New Museum of Evolution

By ROLLIN LYNDE HARTT

UFFALO BILL, P. T. Barnum,

and Brigham Young figure amusingly in the tales called forth by the dedication of Yale's fine new building for the Peabody Museum, whose invaluable scientific collections are at last reinstalled after seven years of storage.

Buffalo Bill joined Professor O. C. Marsh's military escort when that adventurous geologist was hunting skeletons of dinosaurs for Yale, and one night, after Marsh had been explaining how the region now covered by the Rockies was in prehistoric times a lake, Buffalo Bill remarked: "The Professor told the boys some pretty tall yarns to-day, but he ipped me a wink as much as to say, You know how it is yourself, Bill?" "

Barnum, it will be remembered, ran a museum of his own, and an old newsaper cutting relates: "Marsh once met

Barnum in a railroad car. He knew Barnum from his portrait, but Barnum did not know him. They entered into conversation, and Barnum told him of a number of curiosities which had been picked up for his museum but which his agent offered for sale before they could be put on exhibition. 'Some little cuss up in New Haven bought them,' said

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To Brigham Young, however, Yale's Museum and its distinguished emissary were precious. Without Marsh Brigham would have been at a loss to explain why the Book of Mormon recognized the existence of horses in ancient North America. European scientists, Huxley among them, asserted that there were never any horses in this hemisphere until Europeans brought them. But Marsh, by discovering fossil horses in the West, refuted Huxley, and greatly consoled the Mormons.

Visitors at the new building of the Peabody Museum, on Pierson-Sage Square, see those same fossil horses, and recall Marsh's statement: "I first laid my full conclusions, as shown by my own specimens, before Huxley when he visited me in New Haven in 1876. He in

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formed me that my facts fully demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question and for the first time indicated the direct descent of an existing animal." What would Huxley say now? The whole lower floor of the new Museum is given over to a demonstration of the theory for which Huxley contended. No sooner have you entered the Gothic door facing Whitney Avenue and crossed a vaulted rotunda reproduced from the Château of Coucy than you are confronted by a placard inscribed with Tennyson's poem on evolution.

Here, manifestly, is something new in museums. Not a show merely. Not a succession of astonishments for their own sake. Not an exhibition got up mainly to elicit the exclamation, "Isn't nature wonderful?" Instead, something like the evolutionary chapters of Wells's "Outline," with each sentence accompanied by a concrete fragment of reality to establish its truth. For this is emphatically a teaching museum-as Director Richard S. Lull puts it, "a museum of ideas illustrated by specimens, and not merely a curiosity shop, as was the old conception."

In speaking of it thus Professor Lull is far from discrediting his predecessors. If they were showmen chiefly and teachers only incidentally, so were practically all museum directors then, and no one felt much disturbed when a small boy, after visiting a museum of stuffed animals, said that he had "been to a dead circus." But "dead circuses," while fascinating, can be greatly improved upon. Since the demolition of the old Peabody Museum to add room for the Memorial Quadrangle, Professor Lull and his colleagues have had a long time in which to plan improvement. During that long time they reached a conclusion that, inasmuch as the evolutionary idea is central in all modern scientific thought, the prime function of a scientific museum should be to present clearly and effectively the evolutionary idea.

Accordingly, the Museum stars its fossils. Accompanied with colored drawings of extinct animals and with maps showing how the continent underwent amazing changes as era succeeded era, they reveal the prehistoric history, so to speak, of North America. This much accomplished, a fresh serial begins the story of evolution from that earliest of living creatures, the amoeba, right on up to man himself.

Aware that museum-goers still demand something in the line of a "dead circus," Professor Lull provides here and there those entertainingly realistic "habitat cases" in which a painted background, with natural accessories, gives the speci

mens their appropriate surroundings. Devil-fish swim in an illusion of sea water. Lions slink out from their jungle abodes. A coal-age forest lives again, with tall reeds cast from actual fossil reeds, tree trunks cast from fossils, and painted to look as perhaps it really did look, while a painted background heightens the effect, showing what Pennsylvania must have been in the days when the vegetation that afterward turned to coal was thriving and when the first coal strike was still very far in the future.

At intervals, too, labels become dramatic, recalling great battles of great beasts millions of years ago. Says one such label, beneath the skeleton of a giant bird-footed dinosaur: "That the specimen here presented received a severe injury during life is shown by an elliptical hole about three inches wide in the right shoulder blade. The injury may have been received in combat with a Triceratops, for the hole is such as could have been made by the horn of that animal." Another label, beneath the skeleton of a female mastodon, reads: "The individual here shown had suffered several injuries, possibly from the tusks of rival males-a broken and healed rib on the right side, a split rib on the left, a

The latest thing

On one side the bare bones show, on the

severe injury in the front of the chest, and one on the left side of the skull just behind the ear." You look, and there are the evidences. It is as engrossing, almost, as watching those battles between great beasts in "The Lost World."

Very interesting also are certain skeletons of prehistoric lizards with wings and of prehistoric birds with teeth. Darwin, who wanted to visit America in order to see them, wrote to Marsh in 1880: "Your work on these old birds and on the many other fossil animals of North America has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution which has appeared within the last twenty years."

Whenever possible, the curators have placed specimens of surviving species alongside specimens of corresponding extinct species, and whenever possible there are conjectural models of extinct animals placed alongside their fossil skeletons Some are by Charles R. Knight. The majority are Professor Lull's own handi work. Moreover, Professor Lull has in vented a way of combining reality and conjecture by producing half-statues of extinct animals. On one side you see the fossilized skeleton mounted on a sil houette of plaster. On the other side the plaster is modeled in the round, with contours arrived at by comparative anat

ther is the animal as it appeared in life

my and with coloring arrived at by pplying known principles of coloration. A great lark the curators have had rranging their Museum, but in the main hey have been altogether serious, stickg to one dominant idea-that of illusating with concrete evidence the theory evolution. Toward the end of the ries they show you how certain familiar ecies evolved. You witness the evoluon of the elephant, the evolution of the mel, the evolution of the horse. A sine display includes a model of the tiny ree-toed "dawn horse," a fossil skeleton his much bigger successor, and a fossil eleton, still bigger, of the horse that rvived in America until the ice age set and ended his career.

These painstaking reassertions of the olutionary doctrine, with the evidence orked out systematically over and over ain and worked out finally in the case man, would no doubt have astonished ofessor Marsh, so constant is the effort prove in 1925 what Marsh thought been settled for good and all in 1882. Not content with demonstrating evoon in the large, the new Museum at de affords demonstration of its various -processes, grouping together specins illustrating heredity, specimens strating adaptation to environment

adaptation for concealment, adaptation for flight, adaptation for defense, etc. and specimens illustrating variation. You see a pair of diminutive jungle fowl with the many varieties of poultry descended from them. You see a rock pigeon and its astonishingly its astonishingly numerous variants. Still more convincing, you see embryology illustrated, and types of primitive man shown in casts from prehistoric skulls and in conjectural heads modeled therefrom.

Having tramped the Museum's entire ground floor, you are still unfatigued, presumably because the simplicity of its arrangement has reduced mental exertion to a minimum. Says Professor Lull: "The old idea was to have crowded cases. Now it is to have comparatively few specimens in cases, each one telling a story, so that interest will be sustained. We are exhibiting, perhaps, one in ten of what we have." Where is the rest?

Down cellar mostly. "Our collections in storage are of tremendous importance," says Professor Lull. "Some of the material has been in the Museum for half a century and never scientifically described. It happens largely because Professor Marsh accumulated a vast deal of material for great monographs and died before more than two of the

great monographs were completed." But you will go upstairs, not down, and

on the way pause to admire two portraits. One of them shows you the genial white-haired American, George Peabody, who became a merchant, banker, and philanthropist in London, and founded this and several other American museums. The opposite portrait shows you Peabody's nephew, the brownbearded, keen-eyed O. C. Marsh, who served as a Yale professor thirty-three years without salary, spent over $250,000 of his own money in amassing his collections, and gave them outright to the Museum. "Daddy" Marsh, the students called him, much to his delight, as he was a humorous fellow appreciative of humor in others. He especially enjoyed the parody of Tennyson, beginning—

"Break, break, break

At thy cold gray stones, O. C."

Upstairs in the Museum the leading attraction is a "dead circus" for the school-children of New Haven-stuffed animals and stuffed birds selected chiefly for their interest and gorgeous beauty. More important exhibits up there are as fascinating to children-stones that fell from the sky, lighted transparencies revealing the wonders of astronomy, a display of animals and birds useful in the trades, the fauna of New England, a hall filled with gleaming minerals, and another given over to the ethnological specimens gathered in regions where man is still a lovely savage.

Whole classes from the schools can visit the Museum. A special docent is detailed to guide them through the building and explain the exhibits-not only those on this top floor, but also the evolutionary exhibits downstairs. The schools are responding enthusiastically, and New Haven's leading clergymen have publicly expressed their approval. Evidently, New Haven is a long way from Dayton, Tennessee. As evidently, it is a long time since Dr. Lyman Abbott was denounced as a heretic for writing "The Theology of an Evolutionist." Even the Yale divinity students prize the Museum. Recently one of them took first honors in Professor Lull's course in organic evolution.

At Dayton the scientists were not allowed to speak out, but at that very time the Yale scientists were preparing a concrete reply to Mr. Bryan, and here, in their new Peabody Museum, is the result. It will be increasingly effective. Two reporters who had "covered" the Scopes trial lately visited the Museum. Both of them remarked, "What a pity that Mr. Bryan never saw this!" The dedication ceremonies were attended by the

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