Wednesday, March 2, 1938
THE CAMPUS ECHO
Page Five
Playing Safe Or ?
By W. N. Hutchins, Ph.D., D.D.,
Acadia University
One week last summer a story and
a statement were brought together in
my reading and while it may not
have been love at first sight, ever
since they have been keeping com
pany in my mind. The story was told
by Dr. Cadman, and you probably
read it where I did.
“A Georgia cracker sitting, ragged
and barefoot, on the steps of his
tumbledown shack, was accosted by
a stranger who stopped for a drink
of water. Wishing to be agreeable,
the stranger said, “How is your cot
ton coming on?”
“Ain’t got none,” replied the crack
er.
“Didn’t you plant any?” asked the
stranger.
“Nope,” said the cracker. “ ’Fraid
of boll weevils.”
“Well,” said the stranger, “how is
your corn?”
“Didn’t plant none,” said the
cracker. “ ’Fraid there wa’n’t going
to be no rain.”
The stranger was abashed but per
severing. “Well, how are your pota
toes?”
Ain’t got none. Scairt o’ potato
bugs.”
“Really, what did you plant?”
asked the stranger.
“Nothing,” said the cracker. “I
just played safe.”
The statement was a personal dis
closure by Sir Wilfred Grenfell—“An
invaluable rule for me has always
been: When two course are open,
choose the more adventurous.”
“I just played safe.” “When two
courses are open choose the more ad
venturous.” One ignominously failed,
the other achieved magnificently, and
the reason is too obvious for explana
tion. The long story of human prog
ress, individual and social, is written
in the romantic language of adven
ture. Emerson said: “Every institu
tion is the lengthened shadow of a
great man.” It would be just as true
to say “Every institution is the
lengthened shadow of a adventurous
spirit.” The great endeavors and
achievements that have enriched the
life of the race are the gift of men
and women who have lived daringly,
often dangerously—a Columbus, a
Cartier, a Nightingale, a Fry, a
Shaftesbury, a Wilberfore, a Pasteur,
a Booth, a Grenfell.
Museums
It’s All in Your Point of View
I once talked to an old cannibal
who, hearing of the Great War rag
ing then in Europe, was most curious
to know how we Europeans managed
to eat such enormous quantities of
human flesh. When I told him that
Europeans do not eat their slain foes,
he looked at me in shocked horror
and asked what sort of barbarians
we were, to kill without any real ob
ject. —Bronislaw Malinowski
^ if
A white youth in Hawaii, seeking
the advice of an older Japanese man
as to his courtship of a Japanese
woman, asked: “Will she object to
my color?”
“Not to your color,” was the re
ply, “but perhaps to your ancestry.”
“Why, what’s wrong with my an
cestry?”
“Well, according to your tradi
tions, you are descended from a mon
key; while according to her tradi
tions, she is descended from the sun
goddess.”
—Clifford Gessler, Hawaii'. Isles
of Enchantment (Appleton-Century)
Great souls have wills, feeble ones
have only wishes.
■—Chinese proverb.
Dinosaur Mausoleum
On the 190-foot wall of an arti
ficial canyon in Dinosaur National
Monument, Utah, will be shown, in
high relief, the actual bones of giant
reptiles which ruled the earth in Ju
rassic time, 125,000,000 years ago.
The stratum that is now being exca
vated was then the bottom of some
lagoon or river estuary, where the
dinosaur carcasses sank and were
eventually buried—monsters with
bodies big as boxcars, necks like palm
tree trunks, and interminable tails.
Their skeletons, now being partially
unearthed, will be left in place and
protected by a roof. Spotlights will
play on each one, and in the center
of the excavation will stand models,
made to scale, of each animal. On
the other wall of the canyon a gigan
tic mural will show the topography
of the country, and the flora and
fauna of that faraway time.
—Dr. Frank Thone in
Science News Letter
Table-Top Museum
The entire museum of Dr. George
Henshaw Childs of the American
Museum of Natural History, com
plete with elephants, lions, tigers,
zebras, giraffes, birds, and habitat
groups, can be placed on the top of
a dining-room table. The animals are
from one to three inches in size;
backgrounds are painted in oil, foli
age is made from knotted thread,
tree trunks of wire and plaster. Sin
gle models of animals are mounted
under glass domes, groups are in
illuminated glass display cases. In
the space of a few inches are exhi
bited groups which would require
IS to 20 feet in a full-sized museum.
—Ralph T. Gardner in
This Week, N. Y. Herald Tribune
Amateurs in Science
The largest amateur museum in
the country. The Bug House Labora
tory, Washington, North Carolina,
founded about 15 years ago by a
group of small boys, today sponsors
the Washington Field Museum, a
center providing all young people in
the city with opportunity for scien
tific study. The museum’s entire
program is planned and financed by
its membership—young men and
women between 16 and 30, and a
junior associate group of boys. Visit
ing professors often lecture, but the
regular class work is directed by ex
perts among the young people. There
are weekly classes in bird life, pho
tography, astronomy, insects, reptiles
and amphibians. Originally housed in
someone’s cellar, the museum now
has its own five-room building in the
city park.
—Alice Bodwell Burke in Youth
Canine Hall of Fame
At Yale’s Peabody Museum of
Natural History there will eventually
be preserved a perfect specimen of
each of the 104 breeds of dogs now
recognized by the American Kennel
Club. Already on exhibition are a
champion French bulldog, a Scottish
deerhound, dachshund, pomeranian,
cocker spaniel, a Great Dane, a
saluki, an international champion
shepherd and, most famous of all.
Toga, member of the dog team which
carried diphtheria serum to stricken
Nome in 1925. Several champions
now living have been allotted their
future place in this canine hall of
fame. The exhibition includes, in ad
dition, specimens of the dog’s ances
tral stock: jackal, dingo, hyena,
wolf, coyote and the African wild dog.
—Bascom Kennady in
Baltimore Sunday Sun
Model Home, 2000 B.C.
A house in which our ancestors
lived 2000 years before Christ is
shown restored to its original condi
tion at a new open-air museum at
Lubeck, Germany, where lived the
tribes that colonized Britain and gave
rise to our Anglo-Saxon culture. It
is a New Stone Age farmhouse—a
rectangular building with steeply
pitched roof of thatch and framework
of rough, unsquared timbers. The
walls are “wattle and daub”—coarse
wickerwork plastered with clay; the
windows square and small. Within is
a central hearth of stone. Math a hole
in the roof to let the smoke escape.
Shelves on the walls and strings from
the beams support cooking and table
utensils—well-shaped, decorated pot
tery vessels of assorted shapes and
sizes. A bow and stone-tipped arrows,
spear and stone war ax, lean against
one of the wooden supporting posts.
—Dr. Frank Thone in Science
A Magnet for Youngsters
About 8:30 every Saturday morn
ing, throngs of children of 10 to 15
years begin to gather before the big
white art museum at Toledo, Ohio.
When the doors open at 9, three or
four hundred youngsters are waiting
to crowd in; at the end of the day
the turnstile will have recorded
around 3000.
They are all there voluntarily—
for the fun of attending classes in
drawing, modeling and painting.
There are even 15-minute classes for
three- and four-year-olds. It’s the
purpose of the museum, which ranks
among the first dozen in the coun
try, not so much to uncover hidden
genius as to develop an appreciation
and understanding of art which the
children may carry into their daily
lives. —Fortune
Flowers of Glass
Around 270,000 people visit Har
vard’s Peabody Museum each year
to see the glass flowers of Leopold
and Rudolph Blaschka. These are
marvels of beauty as well as perfect
botanical specimens; the showy
lady’s slipper has a bee entering the
saclike lip; the cornflower is enter
taining a butterfly; there is a bunch
of familiar black-eyed Susans, a
spray of mountain laurel, a stalk of
goldenrod 30 inches long.
The collection was begun in the
late 80’s, when Leopold Blaschka
sent over the first models from his
home near Dresden, and has been
added to nearly every year since, un
til it now numbers 160 plant fami
lies. Leopold taught the art to his
son, Rudolph, who, now 80, still car
ries on the work. His house is sur
rounded by a garden of nearly all the
plants of temperate North America,
and near-by is a notable collection
of Central and South American flora.
He works in a small room that must
be kept at a temperature of 85 to 95
degrees, wearing a mask lest his
breath disturb the glass; his tools
are mainly a Bunsen burner and a
pair of tweezers. Part of the color
is fused in the glass, part added while
it cools, and part applied afterward.
He is content only with perfect work
—he once made the 20th model of
some peach blossoms before achiev
ing the exact shade and texture he
desired. —Anne Roorbach in
American-German Review
Grave Voices
Every night, the Reverend E. O.
Jolley and Brother H. C. Artley sta
tion themselves, equipped with mega
phones, on either side of the Holly
wood Cemetery, near Atlanta, Geor
gia, to scare away petting parties.
Just as the boy friend say to the girl,
“Let’s have another little drink, hon
ey,” comes the strident admonition
from the darkness: “The eyes of the
Lord are in every place, beholding
the evil and the good.” In most cases,
this puts a sudden stop to the ex
change of pleasantries.
—A. D. Manning in
Atlanta Constitution
Strange Time
In a little American backwoods
town is a clock with no machinery
except a face, hands and a lever. The
lever is connected with a geyser
which shoots out an immense column
of hot water every 38 seconds, each
spout moving the hands forward 38
seconds. Since the spouting never
varies the tenth of a second, the clock
keeps perfect time.
* *
In Switzerland, clocks are now be
ing made without faces. To tell time
you press a button and, by means of
phonographic internal arrangements,
the clock calls out “Half past five,”
or whatever the time may be.
* * *
A Munich professor has invented
a sickroom clock. When a button is
pressed a magnified shadow of the
clock’s hands is thrown on the ceil
ing so that an invalid may see it
without craning his neck.
—N. Hudson Moore, The Old
Clock Book (Stokes)
* * *
Jutting out about a foot from the
side of a house in Fez, Morocco, are
the butt-ends of 12 rafters. Precise
ly at each hour, an attendant places
a flower pot upon the end of one of
the rafters. At midday, all the pots
are cleared away and the whole thing
starts all over again.
—E. K. Gann in Telephony
QUESTION BEE
1. A good thing to season meat
with, at the dinner table, would be
(a) potassium hydroxide, (b) cop
per sulphate, (c) sodium chloride,
(d) bichloride of mercury.
2. Poliomyelitis is the medical
name for (a) hardening of the arter
ies, (b) influenza, (c) measles, (d)
infantile paralysis.
3. Carnivorous animals (a) live in
caves, (b) eat meat, (c) have four
legs, (d) can climb trees.
4. Keen-edged tools like pocket
knives, chisels, and plane blades are
sharpened on (a) a touchstone, (b)
a Rosetta stone, (c) an oilstone, (d)
a keystone.
5. An escapement is (a) a jail
delivery, (b) the place in a dam
where excess water overflows, (c)
part of the driving mechanism of a
clock.
6. In a historic demonstration
staged by Otto von Guericke of
Magdeburg, Germany, before Em
peror Ferdinand HI, two teams of
strong horses were unable to pull
apart (a) the first iron chain ever
made, (b) a Gordian knot, (c) a
pair of close-fitting copper hemi
spheres from which the air had been
exhausted, (d) an automobile tire and
its demountable rim.
7. Ruminants are (a) inhabitants
of Rumania, (b) remedies for rheu
matism, (c) animals like the cow.
8. You should never (a) saw
wood across the grain, (b) touch an
electric-light socket while standing
in a bathtub filled with water, (c)
light three cigarettes with one match,
(d) put oil in the crankcase of a
motor car.
9. Litmus paper is (a) sensitized
paper for making photographic
prints, (b) a modern substitute for
sandpaper, (c) a parchment-like pa
per for cooking vegetables, (d) treat
ed paper used in testing for acids and
alkalis.
10. Red corpuscles in your blood
(a) fight germs, (b) carry oxygen
from the lungs to all parts of the
body, (c) clot the blood in a wound.
11. Two pieces of machinery ad
justed to run at exactly the same
speed are said to have been (a) syn
dicated, (b) syncopated, (c) syn
chronized.
12. If your car won’t run, the
Baby Cries Most During
First Four Months Of Life
Parents fast wearing down under
the strain of the new baby’s crying
can look for some relief when he
reaches the age of four months. This
is the month when babies do the least
crying, Drs. Mary Cover Jones and
Barbara S. Burks found in research
at the University of California’s In
stitute of Child Welfare.
Before the baby is four months old,
he cries because of internal hurts and
bodily needs such as hunger or other
discomforts. After the relatively quiet
fourth month, baby starts to cry
again but for different reasons. He is
older now, has begun to take more
interest in the world around him and
his crying is stimulated by external
causes. He now cries because he
wants to be picked up and petted, or
because he is angry.
■—Science News Letter.
trouble may be in the (a) spark ar
rester, (b) gasometer, (c) ohmme-
ter, (d) transmitter, (e) carburetor,
(f) “B” battery.
13. A Leyden jar is (a) container
for vacuum-packed food, (b) a prized
variety of pottery, (c) a receptacle
for liquid air, (d) a device for stor
ing electricity.
14. What makes your feet try to
use the floorboard as a brake, when
someone else is driving, is (a) a con
ditioned reflex, (b) deductive reason
ing, (c) an inferiority complex, (d)
an inhibition.
15. Plywood is (a) a very flexible
wood that can be bent double with
out breaking, (b) wood built up of
several thicknesses glued together,
(c) an extremely light wood that is
often used for building model air
planes.
16. If ice cubes free together after
you have taken them from the tray,
you can blame it on (a) regelation,
(b) convection, (c) sublimation.
17. A French curve is (a) a shape
discovered to be acoustically perfect
for violins, (b) a drafting tool, (c) a
banked turn in a road or railway,
(d) a form of graph sometimes used
for business statistics.
18. Rapidly moving pieces of ma
chinery appear to stand still when
they are viewed with a (a) stetho
scope, (b) stroboscope, (c) horo
scope, (d) bronchoscope.
19. The radiator of an automobile
(a) keeps the occupants warm in win
ter, (b) makes the car easy to start
in cold weather, (c) helps to keep
the motor from overheating.
20. Wave traps are (a) machines
to harness the power of sea waves,
(b) tuned radio circuits, (c) acces
sories for a trap drummer.
21. Hung from massive steel ca
bles, the great Golden Gate bridge
at San Francisco is an outstanding
example of (a) an arch bridge, (b)
a suspension bridge, (c) a cantilever
bridge.
22. Nonsense syllables like “dal,”
‘bik,” and “noor” have been found
useful for (a) memory tests, (b)
helping poets to make lines rhyme,
(c) attempts to communicate with
Mars.
23. Antimony is (a) money paid
to a divorced spouse, (b) a brittle
bluish-white meal, (c) the opposite
of harmony.
24. A slide rest is used upon a (a)
lathe, (b) microscope, (c) locomo
tive, (d) plate camera.
25. No first-class meteorlogical
observatory would be complete with
out (a) a marimba, (b) a divining
rod, (c) a Bessemer converter, (d)
an anemometer, (e) a hurricane deck.
—Popular Science Monthly