SPAN: August 1961

an

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ROM a ship approaching the San Francisco peninsula on the Pacific Coast of the United States, among the first structures visible are the tall, orange-red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, the world's largest suspension bridge.

Rising above the fog-shrouded skyscrapers of San Francisco city the 746-foot towers stand at both ends of the bridge. Resting on these towers are the graceful curves of the two main cables ascending from both sides, reaching the height of the towers, then descending in a slow sweep almost touching the floor of the bridge, 220 feet above the Golden Gate Channel.

Numerous vertical hangers, following faithfully the slopes of the main cables bear the 4,200foot main span and side spans of the bridge. The floor of the bridge, 90 feet wide, supports a six-lane highway for commerce between San Francisco and Northern California and allows the largest ships afloat to pass underneath. It is also crossed by sidewalks.

The bridge, completed in 1937, takes its name from the channel it spans. The steep-sided strait was named the Golden Gate in 1846 by John Charles Fremont, one of the first Americans to explore California. The name was popularized during the gold rush of 1849 when thousands swarmed to this area.

Today the bridge forms a thrilling part of the San Francisco landscape. The beauty of fonn obtained through utmost simplicity of line and proportion, symmetry and rhythm, is a living tribute to its designer Joseph Strauss, who has blended the structural design so well with the function of the bridge .•

Research has proved a vilal slimulus to increased production on the American farm.

In an article commencing on page jive, an authority on agricultural research discl/sses lhe world's food potenlial.

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PUBLISHER

4

THE WORLD HAS A BIG FOOD

by Byron T. Shaw

8

ON CALL TO HELP Photographs by George Zimbel

12

AMBIKA

14

PRECISE VIEW OF PHYSICS Photographs by Berenice Abbott

18

NUCLEAR EXPLORER

by Richard E. Joseph

20

THE REBEL POET STILL

by Harold C. Schonberg

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PROJECT SUNSHINE Photographs by A. C. Pasricha

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THE

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THE TRIAL OF PETER ZENGER

by Lokenath Bhattacharya

34

SMALL

38

THE SENSE OF TRUTH

by Alexander Eliot

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ALLADIN

46

MASTER

FIRST FLYING

TOWN

AT YERKES

John V. Lund,

Acting Director, United States Information Service, New Delhi.

PU BLISH ED AT

United

States Information

Service,

Sikandra Road, New Delhi, on behalf The American Embassy, New Delhi.

EDITOR

of

Edward E. Post,

United States Information Service.

ART

DIRECTOR

Indoo P. Mukerji,

United States Information Service.

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ARCHITECT

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REBELS

POTENTIAL

The World Has A

BIG FOOD POTENTIAL A

T no time in history have all people everywhere been adequately nourished. Yet the world has the soil, water, and sunshine to produce much more food than is being produced today. We recognize, however, that it takes more than these physical resources alone to provide nutritious diets for everyone. Putting food on the world's dinner table requires the efforts of hundreds of millions of people, concerned not only with production but also with processing, distribution, and consumption offood.

The job deeply involves science and technology, applied on a world-wide scale. This in itself is difficult in the extreme. Even so, the technological problems may be easier to overcome than the educational, economic, and barriers that social or institutional stand if} the way of developing an efficient agriculture throughout the world.

Jn seeking higher levels of food production, there are two obvious courses that can be followed. One is to increase yields on existing cropland; the other is to bring new lands into cultivation.

Progress in several areas of the world has demonstrated that improved farming techniques can increase production enormously.

In Europe, before the rise of agricultural technology, crop yields remained century after virtually unchanged century. Grain production, for example, remained under ten bushels per acre from the time of the -Roman Empire until just before the French Revolution. Then, with the development and adoption of better farming methods, production started to climb.

Per-acre yields of many crops have more than tripled since 1800. In fact, with presently known scientific facts, farmers in most of north-western Europe are now approaching the maximum in economically attainable yields in relation to soil resources.

In the United States, food production was increased for three hundred years mainly by bringing new lands into cultivation.

Significant increases in average yields per acre were not obtained until after 1940, when in order to meet the needs of World War II, farmers began applying on a large scale the results of research In many parts of the world the farmer tends to follow the practices of his father and grandfather.

This bfsis for decision must be changed, so that he may benefit from science and technology.

that had been accumulating for fifty years. Yields of most crops have been increasing since that time and prospects are good for still further progress in the years ahead.

By taking into account yield increases that have been attained in the various soil and climatic areas of the United States, it is possible to assess with a reasonable degree of accuracy the yield potentials in other countries where similar physical conditions exist and where present yields are low. About fifteen years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists used this means to project yields per acre and total world food production attainable by 1960. These estimates indicated that world food needs in J 960 could be more than met for roots, tubers, and sugar, and virtually met for ce~'eals, fats, and oils.

Attainable production of dry beans and peas, nuts, fruits, vegetables, and milk was estimated as likely to fall short of needs. .

In most parts of the world the production considered in 1945 as attainable by 1960 did not take place.

However, the greater-than-anticipated yields of commodities in the United States, plus the recent gains in production in Mexico, Japan, Turkey, the Philippines, and several other countries, indicate what could be done under reasonably favourable circumstances. In the United States, the scientists estimated that by 1960 the yield of rice could be increased thirteen per cent; the increase has actually been fifty-eight per cent (1957-59 average). The projected increase for wheat was eighteen per cent; the actual increase is ninety per cent. For maize, the figures are thirty-one per cent estimated and seventy-nine per cent actual, and for potatoes, the yield increase considered attainable was twenty-three per cent, whereas the actual yield increase has already reached one hundred thirty-seven per cent.

In considering production potentials in the United States, the scientists merely assumed a general acceptance of the technology then being used by millions of farmers. They did not take into account the greatly accelerated rate at which both existing

and new technology would be applied.

During these fifteen years, the use of fertilizer has more than doubled; it is of better quality and is being applied with ever greater precision and. effectiveness. Irrigation has been extended to humid areas to supplement rainfall during critical growing periods. Increasingly effective chemical and biological techniques have been devised for controlling insects, diseases, and weeds. New plant germ plasm for many parts of the world has been incorporated into our commercial crop varieties, making them more responsive to fertilizer, more resistant to diseases and othe:, pests, and better adapted to soil, water, and climatic conditions.

Improvements in livestock and poultry breeding, feeding, and. management have made it possible for farmers to obtain thirteen per cent more pork per sow, thirtyfour per cent more milk per cow, and thirty-six per cent more eggs per hen.

As a result of these and other applications of science and techoology, fewer farmers, using about the same total acreage, are now producing about sixty per cent more farm commodities than were produced during the period 1935-39. This compares with an increase of about twenty-five per cent considered attainable fifteen years ago.

The fact that wide variations in levels of production still exist in different areas of the world gives us reason to be optimistic about yield improvements in those areas where farm output is now low. In 1957 the yield of wheat in Denmark was nearly four times the world average, six times that of India, more than eight times that of Africa, and twice the yield of the United States. The ric;e yield in the Far East, which equalled the 1957 world average and was nearly double the yield in Africa, nevertheless amounted to only half the average yield of rice in North America. Certainly it is safe to say, in ligh t of these figures and considering the technical knowledge available today, that the potentials for increasing production on existing croplands are significantly greater than they were fifteen years ago. In fact, if we consider technical feasibility alone, it would be possible to meet and

Victory against hunger will come only as nations and individuals acquire the vision, the will, and the spirit of cooperation necessary to plan and carry out so great a task.

exceed present world food needs without adding any new cropland.

Considering new lands that could be brought into production, the possi bilities are even greater. Only about ten per cent of the total land area of the world is now in cultivation.

Some sixty per cent is in areas of perpetual snow and ice, tundra, mountains, and deserts; we can assume, for the present at least, that these areas have no practical possibilities for expansion of agriculture.

This leaves about thirty per cent of the world's lands-three times the amount now cultivated-that are not now in agriculture but which have soil, water, and climatic conditions that theoretically permit cultivation. These lands are found mainly among the podzol soil groups in the north temperate zone and the red soils of The tropics and subtropics. For each additional ten per cent of the northern soils that could be brought into cultivation, we would have 300,000,000 new acres for food production, and for each ten per cent of the tropical and subtropical soils about 450,000,000 acres.

Thus we have resources to feed a much larger population than now exists on the earth, but at the rate the world's population is increasing, it is entirely possible that all available land will eventually be needed to provide enough food for all the people.

The figures I have cited have been largely in terms of averages-for countries, for soil groups, and for the world. We all realize, however, that food is produced on hundreds of millions of individual farms, each one different in some way or other.

No farm family tills an "average" soil. Soils vary the whole way in productivity. Some are good to begin with, others can be built up, and still others may never reach high production.

Institutional needs such as credit, insurance, and marketing facilities, plus fertilizers, seeds, and pesticides must be supplied, but they vary markedly with the different kinds of farm enterprises and the educational,

social, and economic conditions that prevail locally. Also, farmers usually are conservative from necessity; very few of them can risk an uncertain In many parts of the innovation. world the farmer tends to follow the practices of his father and grandfather; this basis for decision must be changed, if he is to benefit from science and technology. To his experiences and tradition must be added knowledge and methods developed by other people and adapted to his own farm-whether it be a small dairy farm, a tropical mountain banana plantation, a grain farm on the plains, or a sheep ranch in the semi-desert.

To take advantage of science and technology, most farming systems must be planned ahead for a period of years. The soils need to be improved, to be built up through combinations of such practices as liming, fertilizing, establishing grass, meadows, planting shelter-belts, building stock ponds, using long rotations with grass or shade crops, and putting in devices for drainage and irrigation and for controlling runoff and erosion. Although these improvements may not result. in substantial increases in production and net income the first few years, the eventual benefits will far outweigh the time and labour invested.

Some practices, of course, can bring immediate returns. On many farms, especially in underdeveloped areas, a profitable start can be made with new seeds of superior varieties of familiar crops, simple treatments to control diseases like smut of wheat, fertilizers and improved organic compost, better storage bins, and other simple improvements.

The importance of combini ng several practices for greater efficiency cannot be overstressed. In an experi-

ment with maize in Punjab, India, for example, a local variety that produced twenty-five bushels per acre, when grown in the traditional manner, produced twenty-eight bushels when fertilizer and water control were added. An improved variety grown in the traditional manner also produced twenty-eight bushels per acre, but when it was given the proper amount of fertilizer and water, the yield of maize increased to around hundred bushels. In the United States, average maize yields in North Carolina have been increased fifty to seventy-five per cent by combining high-yielding hybrids, greater plant population, and improved fertilization and soil management.

Full account must be taken of the conditions existing both in the country where the technology was developed and in the country to which it is transferred. A good recommendation for the use of lime in one country may be ruinous in another country with different soils and crops; then too, the use of one technique often depends upon the availability of other techniques.

Also, technical skills of fanners in a given area may not be adequate for a practice that is otherwise suited to them. Therefore, jf farmers, especially those in developing countries, are to progress in an orderly and effective manner, they must have advisory services that are based on knowledge of scientific principles combined with knowledge of local conditions. They cannot depend solely on techniques that have proved successful in other places where conditions may be entirely different.

The laws governing the chemistry of soils are the same in the United States, India, Argentina, Rhodesia, and everywhere else. With sound

Full account must be taken of the conditions existing both in The country where a farming technique was developed and in the country to which it nligll! be transferred. Good practice in one country may not be applicable in another.

training in the basic sciences, technicians can analyze local problems and develop efficient methods for local use based on their knowledge of the basic principles involved in soil and crop management. Lacking knowledge of basic principles and of the scientific method, they are not likely to be very successful when working in an unfamiliar environment. This is as true of the American technician who does advisory work in India as it is of the Indian student who is trained in the methods used in the United States and returns to do advisory work in his own country.

Even when basic principles are transferred from other countries, there must be scientists available with the competence to understand these principles and to interpret them for technicians who work directly with local farmers.

This means that advisory programmes for sustained high production depend upon effective research programmes carried on within each country.

The fact remains that in most of the under¡ developed areas of the world agricultural research facilities and personnel are sadly lacking. Perhaps even more serious is the relatively low esteem in which agricultural scientists are held in many countries. I believe that this unfortunate situation must change-that a well-rounded research programme, supported by Government and citizens alike is an essential component of any country's endeavour to increase its production of food.

I am convinced that in research lies our greatest hope for eliminating hunger throughout the world. We are only now entering the golden era of biological science which will unfold as we gain understanding of the cell as the unit of life. Such understanding will be particularly important to agriculture, for if we can better understand and control the mechanisms and functions of living cells, we will have vastly increased ability to breed more productive, higher quality crops and livestock. We will also be able to control or eradicate diseases and insect pests, to maintain the quality of farm products during processing and marketing, find new uses for farm-grown raw materials and improve human nutrition.

Recent evidence indicates that the gene may not be the fundamental unit of heredity, in terms of composition, but may consist of chemical subunits. An understanding of the chemical organization of these fundamental units, how they reproduce themselves, and how they produce their effects in the organism would provide valuable new methods of genetic control in plant and animal

Maize yields have been increased fifty to seventy-five per cent by combining high-yielding hybrids, greater plant population, and improved fertilization and soil management.

populations. If we can understand the chemistry of genes, we may learn how to modify them by chemical treatment. From this it follows that metabolic processes would become subject to modification. The implications of such mastery over biological behaviour are tremendous. If specific desirable changes could be made, the rate and amount of genetic improvement in animal and plant populations would far exceed anything that is now possible.

This increased production of food must also be distributed to millions of people living in towns and cities, and the distribution improvements required are as important as those involved in increasing food production and perhaps more difficult to accomplish. In the first place, until distribution channels are available, farmers lack the incentive to produce larger quantities of products than can be used by their own families and perhaps their neighbours. By distribution channels, I mean not only transportation, storage, handling, and processing facilities but also reliable markets, that is, customers with the

ability to buy farm foods at prices high enough to give farmers a fair return on their labour. When it pays to increase food production, farmers generally seek ways to do it.

It is significant that the countries in which food output per acre and per animal has shown the greatest increase are, almost without exception, the countries in which highly developed industry and concentrations of people in cities have provided farmers with industrial goods needed for efficient production and with profitable domestic markets for their products. Thus, favourable social, economic, and institutional conditions are essential for efficient food distribution just as they are for efficient production.

I am convinced that the world has the natural and scientific resources to feed its people today and for many years to C0me. I am equally convinced that victory against hunger will come only as nations and individuals acquire the vision, the will, and the spirit of cooperation necessary to plan and carry out so great a task .•

An old-fashioned office in the city hall at Tishomingo houses the Extension Service team of three farm specialists, headed by County Agent Jack Ryan, seated.

HE BIG, sturdy figure of Jack Ryan, agricultural agent for Johnston County, Oklahoma, in southwest United States, is a welcome sight to many a neighbour worried by a farming problem: he represents the skilled help of both the State agricultural college and the Federal Department of Agriculture. His brawny hands have worked with agronomy texts and laboratory equipment as weU as plants, hoes, tractors and animals, and he can translate book learning into practice. Jack is actually a teacher.

Answering calls at one farm after another, his car averages 1,400 miles a month. Every foot of the way this son of a Choctaw Indian watches for signs of trouble with eyes as alert as Indian eyes traditionally are, squinting under the Oklahoma sun. An ant hill, or the peculiar sticky sheen on a cotton leaf that means plant lice, is the kind of discovery that signals immediate action.

Ryan feels the entire physical condition of Johnston County is his responsibility: water, soil, plants, farm machinery and buildings, even many departments of the home. He sometimes crosses professional boundaries to take an interest in family health. "His sense of dedication is remarkable," says a friend.

"He's also the sort," says the local newspaper editor, "who, when asked to drop by the house and give some advice on trimming shrubbery, does the whole job while telling you how. Jack's working days are long because, no matter how busy, he stops to talk to anyone as if he had all the time in the world. But I guess what makes him so effective is that he teaches by doing, rather than just handing out a pamphlet."

This is the policy of the more than eleven thousand county agents in the United States: personal demonstration. Jack's life, his day, his methods, are typical of the others. While his pay comes forty per cent from the Federal Government, thirty-five per cent from the State and only twenty-five per cent from Johnston County taxpayers, the people of the county are his boss. Through their community council every year they decide whether his work has been satisfactory. Jack has held the job since 1948.

T

Trademark of Jack Ryan, son of a Choctaw Indian and County Agent for the Agricultural Extension Service in Johnstoll County, Oklahoma, is an habitual smile.

ON HELP County Agent Ryan teaches a JohnS/Oil County farmer and his son the best way to trim a hoof

The Life of a County Agent The county agent travels a two-way street. He not only brings to farmers new knowledge resulting from agricultural research but carries the facts of farm problems back to teaching and research specialists at the Oklahoma State agricultural college. Extending knowledge beyond classroom and laboratory walls, this system is called-logically-the Agricultural Extension Service.

It was at the college in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to which Jack now reports as a county agent, that he won his agronomy degree, earning his way through school by milking cows.

An old-fashioned office in the town hall at Tishomingo, the county seat, houses the Extension Service team, three trained farm specialists. A home demonstration agent helps housewives make better homes, while Jack

To chcck a formula, Jack Ryan visits a local store with a farmer who wants his recommendation as to the proper insecticides to use for the protection of certaill crops.

In Ryan's opinion, "The smartest things on farms are youngsters." He spends much of his time counselling the farmers of the future. The great majority of farm youngsters have continuing projects all their parents' farmsprojects which are their responsibility.

Jack Ryan also spellds considerable time ill the laboratory voluntarily equipped by farmers to enable the county agent to analyze their soils. III the analysis he is making here, Ryan discovered after three hOllrs and fOllr different tests that the soil sample he was testing was high in organic matter but lacked enough phosphorus to make it highly productive.

"Half the fun of getting a new tractor is talking about it," according to John Cheogle, whose parents prior to 1863 were Negro slaves of Oklahoma Indians.

John, who owns a two-hundred-acre farm, discusses with County Agent Ryan the labour-saving jobs his new tractor's special attachments will perform.

The worst problem in Jack Ryan's experience was the overflow of the Washita River, which silted over acres of good maize land.

Taking samples of the silt cover, left, the county agent, after tests, analyses and study, experimented with various means of breaking up the flour-fine, caked deposit, a sample of which he inspects below. After several diskings and the addition of needed minerals, the same land in the following spring yielded a crop of four thousand poullds of grain sorghum per acre.

County Agent Ryan discusses common farming problems with Asian agricultural students visiting Johnston County.

Ryan's assistant county agent spends most of his time with rural youngsters. People stop in at their offices all day long. A dairyman may come to ask Jack about a problem in shipping milk to market. Others may bring -or telephone-questions about planting, ploughing or pasture. A farmer and his wife will call to learn the results of a soil test of their land. (Some time ago local farmers equipped a laboratory for Jack, at a cost of one dollar each. Every contributor is entitled to two soil analyses free.)

Sometimes Ryan holds public meetings to explain new and better agricultural practices, or talks on the iocal radio or releases a news story, but human relations are still his best teaching medium. At one farmer's request be may show how to hand-fertilize a melon patch. On another's farm, while discussing how to meet sanitary dairy standards, perhaps he finds a tractor plough being repaired and offers to demonstrate the latest techniques of arc welding.

The worst problem in Jack's experience was the overflow of the Washita River which silted over acres of good land in the slimmer of 1957. Consulting with a government soil conservation engineer, he experimented with various means of cutting up the flour-fine, caked deposit. "It was lot of hard work," says Jack. A tandem disk worked best; they used it again and again, then hoped for rain. Before planting in the spring the land was disked again. Jack discovered that the silt lacked phosphorus, so this element was added in spring planting.

The crop of grain sorghum planted on the reconditioned silt gave an excellent yield of four thousand pounds per acre.

But the crop that most interests Ryan is Johnston County's children. A devoted father and head of the young people's school in his church, Jack loves to work with the farmers of the future. "The smartest things on farms are the youngsters," he says. "Sometimes they learn faster than you can teach them." In the unlikely possibility that he should train up a generation which would never need to call on him for help, no one would be happier than Jack Ryan .•

Jack Ryan/eels that the entire physical condition of his county is his personal responsibility: water, soil, plants, farm machinery and buildings, and the condition of his farmers' homes. Sometimes he even crosses professional boundaries to examine sore throats and other minor ailments.

Thirteen-year-old Ambika, gift of the Maharaja of Mysore to the children of America, arrives ashore in NO/folk, Virginia, in a rope sling, above, from the deck of the freighter which brought her. Ambika's mahout, Mohammed Ibrahim Sabjaan, accompanied her. At left, they take a walk along the pier in the company of Captain John B. Kauserud, skipper of the freighter.

Upon her arrival in her new home in the National Zoological Gardens in Washington, opposite page, Ambika receives a cordial welcome. Among those to greet her were, in the picture immediately opposite, Venu and Mythili Chari, children of the Assistant Cultural Attache of the Indian Embassy, and, being held by the mahout, Suzanne Szabo, daughter of the American photographer who made the picture.

NDIA'S latest ambassador of to America is assured of Igoodwill popularity even if she "throws her weight about !"

The thirteen-year-old, ton-and-ahalf emissary Ambika-a gift from the children of India and the Maharaja of Mysore to the children of Americawas originally a denizen of the Coorg forest in Mysore. She has been trained for riding and performing sundry tricks, such as standing on her hind legs. Her mahaut, Mohammed Sabjaan, has accompanied the elephant to the United States. Ocean transport from Calcutta to Norfolk, Virginia, was provided free by the Isthmian Lines. Free inland transport through various towns, where the elephant was seen and greeted by American children before proceeding to her permanent home in the National Zoological Gardens in Washington, was arranged by the American Trucking Associations.

Ambika's two-month sea voyage was mainly uneventful but, owing to the bad weather, she often missed her twice-daily bath. On arrival in the Norfolk port, she was reluctant to come ashore but was finally induced to walk into a cargo net, in which she was lowered to the dock to the accompaniment of much trumpeting.

She was formally presented to the children of America at a gala ceremony in Washington and was accepted by Mrs. Elizabeth Heller, Chairman of the Sharc-Your-Birthday Foundation.

Among those who attended the cere-

mony were Mrs. Chester Bowles, wife of the U.S. Under-Secretary of State, and Dr. K. V. Verki of the Indian Embassy.

Ambika is an expectant mother.

In spite of their scant experi~nce with elephantine maternity problems, . her new American keepers anticipate no difficulty in delivering the baby elephant safely.•

THESE photographs of a steel ball in motion are portraits of natural lawsportraits of the action of force on a body, of impulse, of momentum, of kinetic and potential energy, of the conservation of energy. The laws which govern this bouncing ball are the same laws which govern the behaviour of the tiniest subatomic particle and the vastest galaxy in the heavens.

The pictures which appear in these pages were made by the noted photographer Berenice Abbott to illustrate a new secondary school course in physics which teaches students to understand and use such fundamental laws.

The Physical Science Study Committee, a group of American physicist~ and teachers, developed the new course under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National Science Foundation. It is now being taught in a thousand United States high schools and is being adapted for use in several other countries.

Miss Abbott's photographs are not the only unique aspect of the course.

Its designers were guided by the question: What is the best way to present each topic? For some subjects they chose text, for others motion pictures, for many they developed experiments through which the pupil discovers the answers for himself. The result is a course which gives future scientists-and all other students-an appreciation of the methods, the development and the beauty of science.•

Six beams of light plus a plastic box filled with water, below, demonstrate the behaviour of light passing through a prism. The beams, coming from a source at the bottom, are bent, or refracted, as they pass from air to water and then from water to air. The fourth beam from the left is partly refracted, partly reflected towards the right.

Beams five and six are wholly reflected from the face of the prism, then refracted as they leave it.

The time exposure photograph below shows that motion is described differently, depending on the frame of reference of the observer. Lights were fixed to the axis and the rim of the moving wheel. To the cameraor to an observer standing alongside-the point of light on the rim describes a complicated curve called a cycloid. In respect to the axis of the wheel, the same point describes a straight line.

The model at right represents one of the many different sugar molecules, showing the grouping of the dark carbon, the light hydrogen and the somewhat larger oxygen atoms.

A ripple tank was used to make this set offour pictures. TOP LEFT: Reflected water waves, like light, leave the reflecting surface at the same angle at which they approach it. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.

CENTRE LEFT: An interference pattern is produced in water by the generator at the bottom of the picture. Waves leaving the generator interfere with waves reflected from the barrier, giving the radiating nodal lines characteristic of all interference phenomena.

BOTTOM LEFT: Another interference pattern is created by two generators vibrating in the same frequency to effect two circular wave systems. BELO W: Like light, water waves produce shadows. Here straight waves are incident on a round obstacle placed in the tank. The shadow above the dark disk is readily seen. The shorter the wave length with respect to the size of the object, the sharper the shadow.

Multiple-flash photographs of a swing pendulum in these two pictures illustrate the transfer of potential and kinetic energy. The potential energy of the bob at one side of the swing has been converted to kinetic energy when it reaches the perpendicular and the converse occurs as it swings to the opposite side. The analysis of the stroboscopic camera which exposed the film at equal time intervals in the photo at left, shows that the bob travels farther in an interval at the bottom of its swing than it does at the top. Gravity accelerates the bob's speed on the way down, slows it on the l\;ay up. Accelerations and decelerations are uniform.

The simple demonstration below proves the geometrical calculation that the virtual image of an object is located behind a mirror. The lighted candle was moved about behind the mirror until it coincided with the image of the unlighted candle. Viewed from any angle, image and object appear to be the same candle.

ONE

evening nine years ago, a few physicists at the University of Michigan were having a casual conversation.

One of them glanced at the streams of bubbles in the carbonated beverage they were sipping and said jokingly, "Nuclear physics should be easy. You can see tracks in nearly everything."

Donald Allan Glaser, assistant professor of physics, thought over the remark somewhat more seriouslycould the bubbles actually be affected in some way by cosmic rays striking through the carbonated liquid?

The next day, Dr. Glaser got bottles of ginger ale and other drinks, and placed them near a gamma ray source.

Then he uncapped them. Result?

"Nothing happened," he related. But he was encouraged to make more serious experiments. Dr. Glaser had already been mulling over the problem of observing the activity of the subnuclear particles produced by atom smashers. "In May, ]952," he reported, "I began to try a new approach to the problem." It was most successful, leading him to develop the "bubble chamber," the invention for which he received the Nobel Prize in physics in December 1960.

Before Dr. Glaser developed his bubble chamber, physicists had two ways of seeing and measuring what went on inside the invisible atomic nucleus-photographic emulsions and the cloud chamber. Their inventors also had received Nobel Prizes-C. T. R. Wilson for his cloud chamber in ]927, and C. F. Powell for his emulsion method in 1950.

A cloud chamber is filled with air supersaturated with vapour, usually alcohol. When a high energy charged particle enters, it creates ions by knocking electrons off the atoms it hits. Droplets of liquid condense on the ions. Thus a visible trail of drop-

Nuclear Explorer lets shows where the particle has been, much as a vapour trail in the sky shows the path of a high flying plane.

By scrutinizing the trail and. noting how it is affected by a magnetic field, physicists can determine the particle's velocity, charge, and momentum.

Occasionally the particle collides with the nucleus of an atom in its path, and physicists get another bit of data about forces in the nucleus. Or the particle may decay into lesser particles which speed off in various directions.

These interesting "events" are rare, however, for collisions in the gas, with its widely-spaced atoms, are few and far between. And it takes about five minutes to clear the cloud chamber after each event.

The chances of a collision can be increased by putting lead plates in the chamber to stop low energy particles, or by increasing the gas pressure, thus decreasing the distance between the atoms. But the lead plates obscure the very events they help bring about, and increased pressure lengthens the time it takes to clear the chamber.

The photographic emulsion method uses a solid, rather than a gas, to trap nuclear particles. As particles speed through a thick emulsion, they "expose" it, much as light exposes ordinary film in a cam.era. Special extra.thick emulsions are used to make the tracks visible over a greater distance.

Small, light, and simple, the dense emulsion is good at collecting "interesting events." But the advantage is somewhat dubious-collisions are so frequent and paths are so crooked

that physicists cannot measure the effects of magnetic fields. Another difficulty is that a photographic emulsion starts picking up random. tracksboth cosmic rays and the Earth's own radioactivity-from the second it is manufactured. This makes it difficult to figure out the separate events and tell when the tracks were made. Last, but not least, physicists must use powerful microscopes just to locate the tracks themselves. Studying them is even more difficult.

A new piece of apparatus was needed, one that combined the flexibility and visibility of the cloud chamber with the accurate tracking of the emulsion method. Dr. Glaser began to investigate the possibility of using a liquid.

"What kind of reversible process in a liquid," he asked himself, "could show the path of a flying particle and quickly erase the track after its passage?" In the Wilson cloud chamber, droplets condensing on the ions make visible the actual effect of the particle.

Perhaps, thought Dr. Glaser, a superheated liquid could serve as the highly unstable medium in which a nuclear particle would trigger a large effect.

How does one produce a superheated liquid? A very pure liquid may be heated above its usual boiling point and yet not boil, if contained in a clean, smooth vessel. When this superheated liquid finally does boil, it does so violently, occasionally even destroying the vessel. To prevent superheating, laboratory workers throw bits of broken glass into the liquid to trigger boiling. Dr. Glaser wondered whether, given suitable conditions, a nuclear particle could perhaps trigger the tiny bubbles that initiate the boiling process. If it could, the particle might leave a visible track of tiny bubbles in a superheated liquid.

Ordinary ether (the anaesthetic) might be such a suitable liquid, he decided, if superheated to about 285 degrees Fahrenheit. He constructed an apparatus consisting of two narrow glass bulbs-each one-tenth of an inch in diameter-connected by a thin capillary tube, and filled it with pure ether, leaving a small space unfilled.to accommodate vapour from the ether.

Then he placed one bulb in a bath heated to 320 F., and the other in a bath heated to 285 F. This forced liquid into the cooler bulb, filling it.

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0

Nobel prize-winning American physicist, Dr. Donald Glaser, inspects the pilot model of his bubble chamber, a device for tracking speeding atomic particles.

Dr. Glaser is currently visiting India.

For his liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, Dr, Donald Glaser received the Nobel Prize Increased pressure caused by. heating prevented the liquid from bOlbng.

Then Dr. Glaser removed the 320 F. bath. The ether vapour cooled and allowed the pressure to drop. Thus, the liquid in the 285 bulb became superheated, a.nd could rem.ain stable for several minutes. However, when Dr. Glaser brought radioactive ~ob~lt near, the liquid began to boll instantly.

Further experiments confirmed this discovery that ionizing radiation .co~ld trigger boiling in a superheated liqUId. "The next step," said Dr. Glaser, "was to find out whether the process could be localized to form a track of bubbles."

He built another apparatus, again using ether, but with a larger bulb with an inside diameter of one-half inch and with a hand-operated piston to lower the pressure quickly. A hi~hspeed motion picture camera, takmg 3 000 pictures a second, was used to observe what happened when the pressure was lowered.

"Sure enough," Dr. Glaser report~d, "the pictures disclosed a track of tinY bubbles when a particle darted throug~ the superheated ether." This expenment also showed that the bigger the bulb the shorter the time the superheat~d liquid can remain stable, because a larger bulb is more likely to catch stray radiation.

The bubble chamber turned out to be a very sensitive instrument. Dr. Glaser next built a two-inch bubble chamber, and then a six-inch model filled with liquefied pentane (a hydrocarbon found in petroleum), under pressure, for use with the cosmotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. Out of the first 22 pictures taken with the new six-inch chamber, eight showed one particular "interesting event" rarely caught by nucle~r emulsions and almost never seen 111 cloud chambers.

In 1956, a new version using liquid xenon made it possible to observe uncharged particles.

Another ty~e using liquid hydrogen al!owed P?ysIcists to observe the behaVIOur of smgle protons when struck by othe.r particles.

Hydrogen is used because Its nucl~us is just that--a proton-and nothmg more.

Today every large physics research laboratory has at least one bubble chamber.

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Born in Cleveland, Ohio on September 21, 1926, Dr. Glaser was graduated from high school at fifteen.

He then entered Case Institute of Technology, planning to become a mechanical engineer. After six weeks, however, he changed his mind and took up physics. .

He received his Bachelor of SCience degree from Case in 1946, then spent another year there as a t~aching MOVing to fellow and instructor.

California for graduate work and a teaching fellowship at the Cal.iforni.a Institute of Technology, he II1vestJgated high energy cosmic rays for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis.

Dr. Glaser became an instruct~r in physics at the Universit~ of Michigan in 1949, then an aSSIStant pr?fessor and finally a full professor In 1957. 'In the summer of 1960 he joined the University of California at Berkeley to work at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, which has the world's largest bubble chamber, a liqUId hydrooen model 72 inches long. o Physicist Glaser is also an aC~OI!lplished musician. He was a VIOlIst for the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra while studying at Case, and also plays the violin and piano. A devotee of chamber music, he still joins friends in quartets.

Dr. Glaser relaxes with squash and tennis; he also skis and goes mountain-climbing when he has the opportunity.

Dr. Glaser married a University of California graduate student of mathematics, the fonner Ruth Louise Thompson in November 1960. He met her while working at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

Dr. Glaser "always wanted to do som.ething with particle physics." No.w that he has, however, a career In experimental physics no longe~ seen:s to intrigue him. When he arnved 111 Stockholm in December to accept his Nobel Prize, he announced that he was going back to school-to study biology! He has arra~ged .to study for one term at the ml~robl.ology laboratories of the U I1Iverslty of Copenhagen, "like any graduate student. " Dr. Glaser explained that he wanted to "escape" from the "administrative work and heavy responsibility" of directing the fifty or more people working on projects with the b~bble cham.ber. If Dr. Glaser contlllues his study in biology, he may be able to apply physics to solving biological problems .•

T

HE man who has written some of this century's most powerful, arbitrary, beautiful, ugly, experimental, explosive, incomprehensible (to many), admired and controversial verse is a small, wiry, proud and quiet poet who has lived for some 30 years on the bottom floor of an old house in a Greenwich Village alley. E. E. (for Edward Estlin) Cummings, 67 years old, peers on

the world from big, hooded eyes set in a narrow, and even suspicious face.

For most of his years he has done nothing but paint, chiefly in oils, and write-largely poetry, with two plays and many essays thrown in.

His house lacks both a radio and a television set, two symbols of what he considers the "demolition" of modern life, "not so much because people play their radio and television

sets all the time as because they don't hear and see them." He says he does not even read too much these days.

"I've had my education." All of his time is spent on his work. He has few friends, virtually no social life, and his bank account will never attract the interest of the major investment companies. But throughout his life he has done exactly what he wanted to do, has written exactly what he wanted to write, and what he has written often arouses many people to livid fury.

He has been called by many harsh names and whenever an editor wants to liven up a dull section he sends out a reporter to do a piece in mock Cummings-ese. The Pulitzer Prize committees invariably pass him over.

To all of this Cummings shrugs his shoulders. "I'm an individual," he proudly says. "In an age of standardization it's almost impossible to express the attitude of an individual.

If 180,000,000 people want to be undead, that's their funeral, but I happen to like being alive."

The word individual runs through much of his speech and is implicit in all of his poetry. "To like an individual because he's black is just as insulting as to dislike him because he isn't white. An individual is unique-or else, like most people, he's not an individual."

Many of his friends suspect that Cummings finds most of his fellow poets and writers undead, or not very much alive. He has never associated with any group or, as he terms it, gang. In his Paris Left Bank days he met the Aragons, Bretons and Picassos, the artists and musicians and writers. But he was never part of any circle. "They were group people, intellectuals. I was myself.

What I liked about Paris was ParisNotre Dame, the girls, the river, the street cries, the Closerie des Lilas.

If I hadn't known one soul in Paris it wouldn't have made the least difference. Right now, I'd rather have two good friends than half a million admirers." Small wonder that

ANEMONES by E. E. Cummings

0

It was pure Yankee stubbornness.

Cummings did "detest the Germans" ; he had joined the ambulance corps before the United States entered the war. But he did not like the way the questions were put to him or the direction they were taking.

His life has been spent in a search for style. He started, in his Harvard days, as a poet in the Keats traditionSurely from robes of particolored peace with mouth flower-faint and undiscovered eyes and dim slow perfect body amorous

-but very soon discovered a different means of expressing. himself. At Harvard he specialized in Greek and

Henry David Thoreau is one of his great loves.

To be an individual in the Cummings sense is to prize the literally sacred truth of one's uniqueness; to preserve it and never stop fighting for it. These are the classic Yankee traits, and Cummings is much the same now as when he was graduated in 1915. "Fairly solitary, very NewEnglandish, you know. He's the last New Englander. He's always been retiring and a little shy."

Cummings tries to mask his shyness. This can take the form of extreme taciturnity, and as a result people who do not know him well may consider him forbidding. But he has been known to be as scared of people as they can be of him. As a young man he once tried selling magazine subscriptions and fainted when his first potential customer opened the door. On the other hand, he is capable of eight-hour monologues when with a few old friends.

When it comes to a question of principle, the slight figure of Cummings assumes the tensile strength of a skyscraper girder. He could easily have escaped those months in a French concentration camp during World War I (out of which came The Enormous Room, one of the most discussed anti-war novels of the 1920's), but he felt that his rights had been imposed upon, and he refused to answer the questions of the French officials. "Do you detest the Germans?" he was asked. To walk out of the room a free man, all Cummings had to do was say, Yes. "No," he answered, "I love the French very much."

from that language, as well as from Latin, he picked up a number of ideas. Classical texts, Cummings points out, "never begin a sentence with a capital. Capitals are for emphasis, nothing more. And I'm told that English is the only language in which the first person singular is capitalized." The Greeks also had a device called tmesis-the separation of parts of a word by intervening words. Thus when Cummings writes "l(a leaf falls)oneliness" he has a venerable precedent. Even his punctuation has a precedent. Sam Jacobs, the only typographer who could set his poems in the old days, smiles tolerantly when anybody mentions Cummings' habit of omitting the space between commas and adjacent words. "In fine old books, especially French ones," says Jacobs, a learned man, "there was no space before and after a comma. A comma creates its own space. Mr. Cummings knows exactly what he's doing."

The one major debt Cummings acknowledges is to Ezra Pound.

"Everybody in my generation is in debt to Pound. He was to the poetry of this century what Einstein was to physics. He was the guy with the broom."

Most of Cummings' style, however, including the much-discussed and much-parodied typographical innovations, he worked out by himself. As the years passed he developed a bewildering variety of technical devices. These include simultaneity of thought, the use of nouns for verbs and vice versa, unorthodox punctuation, lines sprawling all over the page (but many of these are in reality

strict sonnets) and enormous concentration of material (especially in his last book, "95 Poems").

Yet it is amazing how easily most of his verse can be read once the reader becomes familiar with the Cummings technique and vocabulary.

Basically, Cummings has remained a romantic-a romantic directly in the Keats-Shelley tradition-and in the overwhelming majority of his poems he celebrates much the same things they did: love, the moon, spring, nature, the miracle of self. But he has passed from the riotous lyricism and rowdyism of the early poems: in Justspring

when the world is mud-

luscious the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful

to the compressed (though equally lyric) and almost breath-taking virtuosity of "95 Poems," published in 1958, such as the opening of number 16: in time of daffodils (who know the goal of liring is to grow) forgetting why, remember how

Both poems celebrate spring. The earlier one is lyric, with Pan set as a little lame "balloonman"; and the world is mud-luscious and puddlewonderful; and all of us drop everything to follow the pipes of Pan. But in the later poem it is an older and wiser poet who writes.

The late poetry of Cummings is full of words used in a unique manner: precisely as unbig a why as i'm (almost too small for death's because to find) may,given pe/fect mercy, live a dream

and the reader is forced to go slowly and sift each meaning. "Even so small a 'why'-a nothing, a cipher, an unanswered question-as myself," Cummings is saying, "almost too small for the finality of death to find may, by some miracle, be able to realize an ideal." Or when Cummings writes a line like he sharpens is to am he sharpens say to sing the meaning is that he transforms

people from third-person nonentities

to first-person individualities, and transforms speech to song, or prose to poetry.

The amazing thing is that some critics profess to find no "development" in Cummings through the years.

Any casual reading of the complete poems will reveal a difference in conception and technique between the early and late poems as marked as the difference between early and late Beethoven-between the "Bagatelles" of Opus 33 and Opus 126, for example.

He is a virtuoso, like all superior poets, and he can shape ordinary words and phrases into moments of shimmering rapture. He could have written, with so many bells floating up and down, but how much more sinuous and suggestive of the sound and movement of the image is with up so floating many bells down! Or he could have written, and our shining present must come to an end, but what a difference in and shining this our no\V must come to then!

As for his penchant for breaking lines and words, Cummings explains it several ways. Some broken-up poems provide a specific picture. A parenthesis, for example, can suggest a devices, crescent moon. Punctuation he believes, may increase the expressiveness of a poem. Thus, a line like "are,SpRIN,k,LiNg an in-stant with sunLight" sprinkles all over the page, and the commas inserted into the word "sprinkling" help the effect by scattering the word itself. It is a form of typographical onomatopoeia.

But more than that, Cummings feels, there is a jump in vitality in breaking the words. And the mind is slowed down so that something that is almost average achieves a significance, and a stimulus is provided."

Cummings has never lacked admirers. But for many years his poems were greeted in certain circles with yells of laughter and derision. He continued to write steadily, turning out an enormous amount of poetry.

Naturally, not all of it is of equal worth. Some has become dated. The prose poems and certain of the metri.c experiments are simply that-expenments. The attempts at "Toid (Third) Avenue" dialogue can be painful.

But in the process Cummings compos-edsome of the most tender, imaginative, lovely lyric verse that the lang-

,

uage has to show, and also, more or less incidentally, some of the most pungent satire.

His message, whatever the typographical complexities, is. alw~ys simple; and those typographIcal mlXups are far fewer than ~nost people think. His verse has very httle symbolism or Freudianism or few secret messages. In its directness and i~l~tant communication it is, indeed, positively old-fashioned, and it is significant that his favourite verse form is the sonnet.

But Cummings the virtuoso has had almost from the beginning an ability to write about the same few things in an apparently endless variety of ways, and while one can point to certain lines that might suggest other poets, the wording and style. remain always, unmistakably, Cummings,.

In poetic circles in the. Umte.d States he is a maverick. He IS to tlllS century somewhat as Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth, though Cum-

them Cummings-who has had few followers but whose best poetry has a lyric flow unmatched by any of them -will not be least.

By now he has developed into an old master. Marianne Moore says that she very seldom reads the work of a young poet without seeing traces of Cummings, most of them unconscious traces. Charles Norman has written a biography of him, published in 1958. Norman Friedman, the critic and college professor, has written a comprehensive study of Cummings' poetry.

Since 1950 Cummings has been getting recognition from official quarters-the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard in 1952-53. a fellowship in the American Academy of Poets and the Bollingen Prize for poetry, among others. Of late, he even has been giving readings of his poetry, mostly before college groups; and, while a crusty mantle still covers his shyness, he enjoys those readings and likes the young people as much as he loathes autograph hunters.

His lectures have proved enormously successful.

No Cummings devotee clubs have as yet been organized. but every now and then (so report his neighbours) a delegation of college girls from perhaps Smith or Vassar. who happen to be in New York, invade Greenwich Village, find Patchin Place (which takes some finding), group themselves outside number 4 and chant in unison Buffalo Bill: Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersl11ooth-silver stallion and break onetlvothreefourfil'e pigeons justlikethat

t . :

He \Vas a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death This they shrill at the top of their lungs and then go away content, having made their pilgrimage.

Cummings' poetry is even beginning to sell, a fact most gratifying to president of William Jovanovich, Harcourt Brace & Company, the firm that has 'published much Cummings, including the 468 pages of "Poems 1923-54." Cummings, reports Jovanovich, is one of the few living poets on whom a publisher will not lose money. "In that," says Jovanovich,

E. E. CUMMINGS Photograph by his wife

mings is perhaps a more precise workman and a subtler master of imagery, rhythm and language. His .importan~e to the twentieth century IS secure If only for the fact that he, more than any other American poet, helped free the language.

The delicate Marianne Moore, the gentle Robert Frost, the tortured, intense Hart C:rane, the super-intellectual T. S. Eliot-all of these will have their permanent place in American literature. and among

The paintings by E. E. Cummings are reproduced from transparencies furnished to SPAN by the poet's wife. ,p

"he ranks with Carl Sandburg, Eliot and Frost. We'll clear expenses with his book and even make a little money.

In poetry that's a real triumph."

Harcourt, Brace had its problems with Cummings' "95 Poems." Gerald Gross, now with Pantheon Books but at that time a Harcourt, Brace editor, worked with the poet on the book. Unlike most other poets, and because he is a painter, Cummings paid a great deal of attention to the visual effect of facing pages. "The sequence was terribly important to him," Gross says. "On one page a wrong poem was inserted. Cummings thought that the two pages clashed, and he wrote a new poem to take care of the situation. He never lost his temper. He's quiet and polite, but he's as hard as steel when it comes to an aesthetic point." Harcourt, Brace still winces when it thinks of the overtime payment to typographers who faced problems not normally associated with books of poetry.

Cummings lives today as he always has, spending most of his time around Greenwich Village. He and his wife, Marion Morehouse, go to New Hampshire in the summer. There they live on a farm that belonged to his father.

For three or four months of the year he has to be alone. Once, at the farm, he picked up an old .38 calibre pistol and fired at somebody who tried to bluster his way in. Cummings, of course, took care to miss, but the point was not lost on his would-be visitor.

His village home has an upstairs studio, where he works. The house is old and damp, which does not help his arthritis, but it is quiet, and Cummings would sacrifice anything for that. From his studio he sees a tree, and not long ago he was terrified that it would be taken down as a neighbourhood "improvement." He told friends that if the tree were lost he would be forced to move. But the tree stayed, and so did Cummings.

He always has had a touch of paganism in him and is deeply and innately anti-science: 1'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars holV not to dance.

Or: While you and i have lips alld voices which arefor kissing and to sing with who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

This paganism is rooted in a religion that glories in a love of life. The sheer miracle of being alive, of being

MATERNITY, Portrait of his wife by E. E. Cummings

able to breathe, see, hear, touch, taste, dream, remains the most glowing and throbbing of mysteries. And this poet, who has never hesitated to call a spade a spade, who can jeer, prod, curse, ridicule and crucify, can also bow his head and write: i thank You God for most this amazing day.for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay. great happening illimitably earth) how should any tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears aw~ke and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.)e

~an

August ;961

23

Artists who created the paintings on these two pages are: I. MRS. AILEEN FELIO. 2. THE ART CLASS, GOVERNMENT SECONDARY SCHOOL, RAMPURA. 3. THE ART STUDENTS, MODERN SCHOOL, NEW DELHI. 4. MRS. M. M/RZA & MRS. All KHAN. 5. MRS. JOYCE GRIFFITH.

Mrs. Browning Las/ie, chairman of the liaison committee of the American Women's Club of New Delhi, presented the collection of paintings for the children's wards to Dr. B. B. Dikshit, left. Director of All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Dr. Edward Holmes. right, who suggested the project. commended the results.

NTERNATIONAL co-operation, need not be restricted to governments or to ambitious development projects. Its most satisfying, but perhaps least publicized, aspect might be that of collaboration among individuals-the modest efforts of men and women of different nationalities jointly to relieve distress and to bring a bit of brightness into the lives of less fortunate persons. An example of suc;h co-operation is provided by a programme organized by the American Women's Club of New Delhi.

When Dr. Edward H. Holmes, an American specialist at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, remarked the bare, bleak walls of the children's wards in the institute's hospital, he asked the American Women's Club if it would be interested in commissioning murals to make the wards a little more cheerful for the young patients.

I

Mrs. Browning Laslie, chairman of the club's liaison committee, immediately took up the suggestion.

After an inspection of the wards and conversations with Dr. Holmes and Dr. B. B. Dikshit, Director of the AIIMS, her committee decided that it would provide pictures. At first it was not exactly clear how this could be done. For several weeks a group of Indian and American ladies consulted on plans. A committee of artists, including club members and two Indian volunteers-Mrs. Mehroo Wadia and Mrs. Sheila Thadanilaunched the project. A corps of artists commenced painting sessions at private studios or in their residences.

Several organizations who heard of the project became interested and supported it, either with services or materials. School children in the art classes of three Delhi schools joined the effort. The pupils of Modern School, under the supervision of Mr. and Mrs. Kanwal Krishna, created several designs from which four were selected and translated into large-size paintings, including a mosaic peacock _ and a folk dance scene. Students of the Government Secondary School, Rampura, Delhi, guided by Miranda Dixit, painted several pictures with Indian rural themes. Mrs. Vicki ~oonan's art pupils of the American International School produced a related series of paintings. A number of

individuals added to the collection, selections from which appear on pages twenty-four through twenty-nine of this issue of SPAN with the names of the artists or artist groups who created them.

When the liaison committee of the American Women's Club visited the children's wards first, they noted a lack of toys as well as pictures. A toy-making project was organized by Mrs. Anna Goodman, in which both Indian and American women again pooled their ideas, talents and labour.

This "cottage industry" attracted an increasing number of participants,

who found it an enjoyable social activity, in addition to the opportunity for service which it provided.

The toy-making has continued through the summer.

Paintings and toys were recently presented to AIIMS and the pictures mounted on the walls. The collection of artwork provides a gallery which is likely to delight everyone, young or old, and which serves exceedingly well its purpose to introduce some brightness and cheer into hospital rooms, which anywhere must present a formidable atmosphere for children.

Encouraged by its initial success, the American Women's Club now plans to extend its Project Sunshine -paintings and toys-to children's wards in other hospitals .•

Alfred Seifker holds a drawing done by Dr. Colbert showing how the gliding reptile probably looked when alive. Joseph Geiler displays the piece of rock in which their find is imbedded, shown in detail below.

Michael Bandrowski is the third member of the trio.

A

HUNDRED and seventy-five million years ago a gliding lizard fell into a great lake that covered New Jersey's meadows in that era and died. Recently three teen-age scientists recovered the lizard's fossil from an old quarry and "opened up a whole new facet of vertebrate evolution."

That is the opinion of Dr. Edwin H. Colbert, chairman of the Department of Vertebrate Palaeontology at New York City's American Museum of Natural History: "This early reptile, which antedates the earliest pterosaurs, or flying reptiles, may have been the first animal with a backbone ever to take to the air. Its elongated ribs served as the framework for membranous wings on which it probably glided from branch to branch, somewhat in the manner of a flying squirre!."

Discovery of the New Jersey aireptile proves that creatures with backbones attempted flight some ten million years earlier than anyone had previously suspected. The youngsters

who found the fossil of the hitherto bedded in the rock was the fossilized unknown gliding lizard are Alfred skeleton - about seven - and - a - half Seifker, 17, Joseph Geiler; 16, and inches long - of a delicate creature Michael Bandrowski, 16-all three resembling nothing they had ever seen ardent amateur palaeontologists. before.

The leader of the trio, Alfred, has The teen-age palaeontologists carehad an absorbing interest in fossils fully removed the skeleton with a since he was thirteen. His interest was base of about one inch of the shale aroused when someone pointed out and sealed the slab in plaster to protect it. Alfred brought their discovery to him the remains of ancient fish imbedded in the black shale of the to the museum.

Dr. Colbert recognized the importold quarry near his home in North , ance of the boys' discovery. The age Bergen, New Jersey. He began to spend much of his spare time digging of the black shale in the North Berin the quarry and sat up at night gen quarry is known to scientists. It studying books on palaeontology. Soon formed as a silt on the bottom of the he amassed a colle.ction of fossils, vast lake spreading across New Jersey most of them, primitive fish. When one hundred and seventy-five million he showed his collection to the palaeonyears ago, at a time when the dinotologists of the American Museum of saurs were just beginning their evolutionary development. The earliest Natural History, they were impressed by the quality of the specimens. known flying reptiles did not evolve until about fifteen million years later and the first known true birds were still some fifty to sixty million years in the future. But the reptile found by Alfred and his friends in the black shale left by the lake was equipped with something like wings.

Skilled technicians prepared the The three young fossil-hunters fossil for study in the museum's labohad been exploring the quarry for ratories and it was exhibited in the museum last April. The airborne some months under the aegis of the museum, when a construction comlizard was about ten inches long when pany commenced excavation of the alive with fourteen ribs supporting quarry, levelling a large area of it a fixed wing that measured ten inches from tip to tip. According to Dr. for the foundation of a big building.

Trucks hauled away rock that had Colbert, it was probably able to glide been blasted free and Alfred and his as far as three hundred feet, but could friends combed a spot where the not actively fly. It lacked the power to take off from the ground, but probably black shale had been exposed near the surface. They dug down into the climbed trees and glided down to the soft shale about two-and-a-half feet ground or to other trees-possibly to and removed slabs of the dark rock. escape the carnivorous mammals just At first they found only coelacanth beginning to inhabit the earth at fish, which they ignored as no longer that time. One of its glides must have rare. Ultimately they brought up a landed it-in the lake, where it evenslab which they split open and knew tually sank to the bottom and was gradually covered with silt.. at once they had made a find. Em-

THE FIRST

FLYI NG LIZARD

the courage of a young printer the righteous eloquence of an old man won the precedent for a free press

"T

HE question before the court and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small nor private concern, it is not the cause of a poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British Governm.ent on the main of America. It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty."

Thus Andrew Hamilton, the defendant John Peter Zenger's able attorney, summed up his final remarks.

The courtroom on that morning of August 4, 1735, was packed to capacity. Hamilton's was an historic appeal that Inarked the recognition of a new dimension of man's independence. The issue involved was freedom of the press. And the people who crowded the court that morning, with strained, anxious faces, eager not to miss a single word uttered, knew that they were witnessing a history-making trial.

It is a wondel" how sometimes the forces of history work through men caught in a vortex of events and hoist them above the ordinary level of their neighbours-make them champions of truth and freedom, instruments of a great cause. John Peter Zenger, otherwise an obscure m.an of modest means, m.aterial and intellectual, was one such instrument of history.

Peter Zenger, a German immigrant, came to New York in 1710, at the

age of thirteen. There he was apprenticed for eight years to William Bradford, at that time the only printer in New York and a top man of his trade in the colonies. Starting as a typical ink-stained printer's devil, Zenger worked his way up in the profession and learnt well the technique of printing. But he was eager to start a business of his own and soon found an opportunity.

Bradford was publishing a weekly journal fully endorsing the policies and acts of the colonial Government and particularly those of the British Governor William Cosby.

Cosby, an arrogant, self-seeking and arbitrary individual, whose word was law in colonial New York, was heartily disliked by the people, and his arbitrary acts gradually helped create a strong opposition known as the Popular Party. Some prominent members of the opposition approached Zenger to print and publish a new weekly paper.

From the day of his appointment as Governor, Cosby sought to exploit his office. He m.ade his son Secretary of the Jerseys and moved to nullify some involved titles to land and transfer the patents to his own name.

He even claimed half of the salary of Rip Van Dam who had served as acting Governor during the months Cosby took to reach America. He dismissed the Chief Justice who sustained Van Dam and appointed

James Delancey to the post. It was the same ousted Chief Justice Lewis Morris who, along with his associates James Alexander and William Smith, sought a printer, with sufficient courage for their new Popular Party newspaper.

"We want you to print a newspaper for us," Lewis Morris, Junior, told Zenger. "We need one to defend the people against this government."

But to print a newspaper every week involved a lot of money. "If Mr. Alexander will be the editor," said young Morris, "you can count on me for the finances. I'll go around with a hat. Mr. Van Dam will put in ten pounds. So will my father.

Every leader of the Popular Party will contribute."

Thus it was that the first issue of The New York Weekly Journal, "containing the freshest Advices Foreign and Domestic," appeared on November 5, 1735. The printer was John Peter Zenger.

The debut of a new journal created a sensation in an environment where little or no freedom of the press existed. The first issue stated the paper's objective in these words: "It is the great design of this paper to maintain and explain the glorious principles of liberty and to expose the acts of those who would darken or destroy them."

sr~ 0/ 9d-

~

(Continued)

The paper came out regularly. Its popularity grew each week. Like most of the colonial papers of the time, it published foreign news, literary essays, poetry, and printed a small amount of advertising. But its principal and most interesting contents were political articles aimed against Cosby and his administration. The articles and editorials were written by prominent opposition members, but were always signed with pen names.

Cosby grew more and more uneasy.

Soon, as was expected, the paper aroused the wrath of the court party, and particularly, when an election victory of the Popular Party was celebrated by Zenger in telling rhyme, Cosby found the Weekly Journal no longer tolerable. Zenger, being the printer, was the only person against whom Cosby could take legal action, although Cosby fully knew that Zenger had little to do either witll the policy of the paper or with the articles it published. He ordered Zenger punished and his paper publicly burned. Then, charged with criminal libel, Zenger was arrested and held in excessive bail.

The stage was thus set for the historic legal b'attle. To make matters worse for Zenger, his attorneys, Alexander and Smith, were promptly disbarred by Cosby's Chief Justice when they challenged that official's credentials. They argued that it was beyond the competence of Delancey and other judges to legally try Zenger.

For, Delancey's appointment as Chief Justice was arbitrary. Secondly, the other judges in the court, if they were to decide the case according to law and justice, could do so only by going against the wishes and orders of Cosby, and that they would not.

order, Smith and Alexander ceased to be lawyers any more and the work of their careers was at an abrupt end.

And for Zenger it appeared to mean, finally, the gallows, since he was now left with no lawyer to defend him.

During ten long months of imprisonment awaiting trial, Zenger had managed to have the paper appear regularly, giving instructions to his wife "through the hole in the Door of the Prison!" The paper continued its fight with as much vigour as ever, to the chagrin and annoyance of Cosby's friends. The journal's imprint still read boldly, "Printed and sold by John Peter Zenger," though now the work was managed completely by his wife, Catherine, who thus became the first woman newspaper publisher in America.

To this challenge, Judge Delancey replied, puffing with anger: "As much as you may wish, you aren't going to gain any applause or popularity by opposing this court! You have brought it to a point where either we must go from the bench or you from the bar. We prefer the latter and exclude you, Mr. Smith, and your partner Mr. Alexander, from the barl"

Zenger stubbornly refused to desist and his prospects continued grim until the very morning of August 4, 1735. Andrew Hamilton, a distinguished lawyer from Philadelphia, was secretly and hurriedly brought to New York by Alexander's wife on the day of the trial, to defend Zenger. Attorney General Bradley, Chief Justice Delancey, and Harrison, Recorder for the City of New York, all Cosby's men, eyed him suspiciously as the aged lawyer, obviously in very poor health, entered the court.

By the sheer tyranny and vengeance of this unexpected and unjustifiable

Alexander, who accompanied Hamilton to the courtroom, made

32

sp~n August

1961

his way to the corner where Zenger stood and whispered to the printer, "We didn't dare tell you sooner.

My wife travelled secretly to Philadelphia in her yacht to persuade this gentleman to defend you, and they returned only this morning. His health was so poor, we were afraid that if we told you, we should get your hopes up only to find Mr. Hamilton unable to make the trip."

The court party still thought that the case was an open and shut one and that Zenger would be proved guilty and then hanged. But, Andrew Hamilton argued so eloquently that the trial established a precedent which later became a part of the United States Bill of Rights assuring freedom of the press as one of the fundamental guarantees of liberty.

Hamilton pleaded for a new interpretation of the common law for seditious libel which, until then, did not accept truth as a defence. Any statement of a scandalous or infamous nature, according to the existing law, was a libel and if statements were made against the king, that was seditious libel. Zenger's prosecutor argued; "To say that corrupt officers are appointed to administer affairs is certainly a reflection on the government. If people should not be called to account for possessing the people with an ill opinion of the government,

no government can subsist. For it is necessary for all governments that the people should have a good opinion of it. And nothing can be worse to any government than to endeavour to procure animosities; as to the management of it, this has been always looked upon as a crime, and no government can be safe without it be punished."

But Hamilton retorted that if truth was not a defence, "governments can become tyrannical at will."

He called upon the jury, not the court, to judge the truth of the matter published.

This was indeed something that had never happened before, but it was the only tactic Hamilton could conceive. When the Chief Justice plainly told him that the court had already delivered their opinion against which none was to be permitted to argue, Ham.ilton had only to turn to the jury and say: "Then, gentlemen of the jury, it is to you we must now appeal, for witness to the truth of the facts we have offered, and are denied the liberty to prove ....

You are citizens of New York; you are really what the law supposes you to be, honest and lawful men; and, according to my brief, the facts which we offer to prove were not committed in a corner; they are notoriously known to be true; and therefore in your justice lies our safety. And as we are denied the liberty of giving evidence, to prove the truth of what we have published, I will beg leave to lay it down as a standing rule in such cases that the suppressing of evidence ought always to be taken for the strongest evidence; and I hope it will

have that weight with you."

Lest this appeal have an undesirable effect on the jury, the Chief Justice loudly remarked: "Gentlemen of the jury. The great pains Mr. Hamilton has taken to show how little regard juries are to pay to the opinion of the judges, and his insisting so much upon the conduct of some judges in trials of this kind, is done, no doubt, with a design that you should take but very little notice of what I may say upon this occasion.

I shall therefore only observe to you that, as the facts or words in the information are confessed: the only thing that can come in question before you is whether the words, as set forth in the information, make a libel. And

that is a matter of law, no doubt, and which you may leave to the court."

The jurors were visibly embarrassed when they withdrew before pronouncing the verdict. Hamilton had convinced them of the justice of his plea; but, they had now to decide whether or not to assume a responsibility no jury in America had ever before been asked to assume. Nonetheless, they faced the risk of the government's wrath and promptly returned the verdict of Not Guilty.

"Upon which," Zenger reported later, "there were three huzzas in the hall,

which was crowded with people, and the next day I was discharged from my imprisonment."

The trial of John Peter Zenger is one of the notable case histories of American jurisprudence. It attracted attention in England, where the press was not yet genuinely free. But the impact of Zenger's case was not confined to England and the American colonies: it established a precedent for the press in all free nations to publish the truth without fear of suppression or retaliation by the state .•

ROBABLY there isn't a big city newspaperman in the United States who hasn't, when weary from the relentless pace of hjs news-gathering job, dreamed of owning a small town weekly paper where he could live in a more leisurely manner. Only one deadline to meet each week instead of seven. No one to object if he takes a day off now and then. Ah, he reasons, that is the kind of life he wants. He'll start right now to find a small newspaper plant for sale. Well, may be not today. He had better wait until he has saved a bit of money-until next year, perhaps.

P

Genesee, upper left, is an average small town, its streets tree-lined except for the central business block. Offices of the Livingston Republican are where the awnings appear at the left side of the picture. Late Wednesday night, with final proofs just off the press, Ray and his wife, far left, share the work of checking for errors. When the weather is good, Ray's three employees-sometimes joined by a visitor, as in the picture above-sit in front of the office for an after-lunch cigarette before returning to work. Saturday is the quietest time of the week in the Republican's office. Ray and typesetter Neil Cope/and, at left, can often be found discussing the layout for one of the printing jobs the plant handles to increase its income. Activities at the Teachers' College in Genesee make good stories. At least once a week Ray stops at the office of the college's public relations officer, upper right, and chats with students who edit the college paper.

Once each year the fifth grade children of Genesee come to the Republican to meet its editor and see the presses operate, at right. It is all important day for them since Ray always has a photograph taken of the children at the plant and prints it in the next issue of the paper.

Ray Sherman, however, was different. He didn't wait for that ever-illusive "next year." Of course, neither did he just go out one day and buy a paper. After graduating from New York University he worked for a small town daily and later for a big city paper. Then one day he had the opportunity to become editor of the Livingston Republican, the weekly paper in Genesee, a town of 3,000 persons in the western part of New York state. The former editor had just gotten out the 100th anniversary edition and had collapsed from overwork.

Ray figured that wouldn't happen to him. So he took the job. Then he took a wife. And then the war came.

When the war was over and Ray came home, he knew exactly what kind of life he wanted. He had faced death and lived. He had, through that experience, gained a new sense of what was, and what was not, important; friendships, time to himself, and work which he felt was worthwhile.

Court proceedings furnish much important news. During a court recess, above, Editor Sherman checks with the district attorney the calendar of hearings scheduled. Dan Chiara, below, operates a shoe repair shop in Genesee and buys space in the newspaper to advertise his services. Ray calls on his advertisers regularly, as well as on persons who are sources of news.

So Ray offered to buy the paper for which he had been working. As he says now, "The bank and I bought it." For the next several years, he and his wife were primarily concerned with making their little publishing plant pay its expenses and repay the bank's loan.

Ray's idea of being a good editor is first to be a good citizen, to take an active part in community affairs.

Among his civic duties Ray has included being chairman of the Boy Scouts; town tax assessor; member of the local volunteer fire department and driver of the fire department's ambulance. He is a member of the Press Association and belongs to a golf club. As a war veteran he is active in the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Nor is Ray's vision bounded by the borders of his town. He feels a responsibility to the entire community which his paper serves, over fourteen hundred families within a radius of twelve miles of Genesee.

He feels that his paper exists to provide an official record of community happenings ("A birth isn't even official until it's announced in the Republican," he chuckles); to promote community activities; to tell his readers where they can buy merchandise they want; and to provide merchants with a place to advertise their wares.

Most of Ray's subscribers also read one of the newspapers published in the nearby large city of Rochester.

And, of course, they have radios. "They get the national and international news from the radio and the Rochester papers," says Ray. "What they want from my paper is news of local interest, things which are important in our own community but which aren't of wide enough interest for the big papers to print. That's what country papers are for-and they are successful in relation to how well they remember that."

Wednesday is a busy day al Ihe newspaper's pfanl. 11opens wilh Ihe monolonous clinking of Ihe Iype-selling machine, Ihe dull plopping of Ihe hand-fed presses, and Ihe occasional screech of melaf being CUi. Wednesday nighl at eight-thirty, left, Ray waits for Ihe pressman 10 pull the last page proofs for correction. At len-thirly, with a slack of mail subscribers' copies ready to go 10 the posl office, Edilor Sherman knows Ihe satisfaction of another edilion published.

Perhaps one of Ray's biggest problems is handling news harmful to personal reputations. In a small town the editor knows almost everyone well, is close friends with many. Ray believes that the traditional freedom of the press does not give him license to publish derogatory information about anyone, friend or foe. But when the information is something the community should know about-such as misdeeds by public officials-Ray does not hesitate to publish it regardless of who is involved.

As do most small town editors, Ray combines publishing a newspaper with producing pamphlets, handbills and other printed matter for businessmen and for the local college.

He has found that he has to be skilled at many kinds of work. "I am," he says, "editor, reporter, copy boy, proofreader, photographer, advertising manager, salesman, layout man, and a one-man subscription department. At times I operate the linotype machine, setting my own copy. If I have to, I can run the presses. And I even make minor repairs to the machinery. One thing I don't do-I don't keep the books or pay the bills.

Thank heavens, my wife does that for me. She's a mighty important person around our office. She's responsible for writing the society column, too."

Does Ray find it a good life? Can he come to work late? Take a day off when he wants to? Be his own boss?

Well-in a way he is his own boss but he finds also that he has over fourteen hundred bosses, his subscribers.

Take a day off? Well, once-in-a-while. He finds he's a little too busy to do it often. Come to work late? Well, there's no one to say anything if he is late. He finds, however, that his day goes more smoothly if he gets to work early. Is it a good life? He knows the answer to that one! He wouldn't exchange it for any other!.

the sense of truth

by Alexander EI iot

F

ROM the shadow-measuring and tub-sitting of the ancient Greek scientists to antibiotics, cyclotrons and satellites has been a fabulous advance.

Where once rode classical thunderheads of intellection, white against the sky, we have dark torrents of numbers and symbols innumerable as raindrops and mingled with the fitful play of man-made lightnings, earthquakes and germs. Near miracles lie stacked like dishes stories high in the brains of giant guardian computers. Yet the loftiest experiments remain those of people. Thomas Jefferson still says more than the bulletins from Cape Canaveral. Christ on the cross flew higher than an astronaut ever will.

Each man that lives is an experiment, self-controlled.

He is both crucible and chemist in himself. Let him but open his own heart and mind, and the cosmos pours in upon him.

He must distill what he can. To realize this plain fact of the human condition can be like awakening from a dream into real life.

They say that the ancient Greeks put man at the centre of the cosmos; but nobody put him there-it is his

cosmos. Granting that in thought a man may travel far from his own centre, which is the centre of his cosmos, and granting even that he may stop off at ::esthetic, philosophical, religious or scientific planets far removed from the mother earth of his own experience, experience brings him home; and in himself he remains the centre of it all. Therefore ::esthetic and philosophical refinement, religious revival and scientific advance can do little to heal our sick culture. A sick culture is made up of sick selves; we have to heal ourselves.

Madness and death-these things we face, and we are too heavily armomed to face them. Madness we call a disease, yet our sanatoriums are very like our jails at one end of the social scale and retirement paradises on the other; they are play streets roped off.

The symptoms add up to the same old withdrawal from reality.

The idea of killing oneself can have much sweetness. To be "half in love with easeful death" is quite all right subjectively. Let a friend take the plunge, and we are horrified. With death the possibility of human un,derstanding ceases. My friend is gone; I remain with my question. But if he had been run over, say, would I feel so bad? We all get run over sooner or later, one way or another.

Since death comes from another world than our world of the living, it must always have an accidental quality.

Yet the ancients called "dying well" the very height of philosophy. Clearly they were not talking about raw courage. The wise man holds his life complete, knows it complete with

Alexander Eliot is best known for his monumental art history, Three Hundred Years of American Painting; yet that work represents only a fraction of his interests. A novelist (Proud Youth) and art critic (Time), Eliot is chiefly obsessed by what he calls "the ultimate problem: understanding with the heart."

Eliot's forebears played distinguished roles in the flowering of New England and Harvard University. He himself makes frequent visits to his home ground, but prefers living in New York City. Eliot travels abroad extensively with his wife and three children for the purpose, he explains, "of trying to rediscover the world with the help of my wife's mind and my children's eyes."

38

S]?an

August 1961

each passing moment and therefore faces death with equanimity.

Aristotle said that tragedies ought to be concerned with renowned families only. He was speaking of the stage. J n real life, however, all those whom we really know and love are heroes to us; they are of noble family, the human family, and their deaths are tragic-because life is tragic, as it is lived now.

The death of a bird does not seem tragic; it has lived its life complete.

Those ducks on the pond will take flight again in a day or so; they have a thousand miles or more still to go, and on the way many will be shot down. Couple by couple they swim and feed now in a kind of bliss.

Instinct brought them here and will blow them on. Resistless, they ride the winds of instinct, and the winds and they are one, the pond and they are one-it is all one and all complete continually. For just an instant a jet liner, Europe bound, casts its shadow athwart the pond. The people in that plane are borne on the winds of circumstance, not instinct; and if the plane should fall-tragedy.

Thought, like the jet liner, casts its shadow now and then athwart the still and central truth, but only for a moment. Thought travels far and far away. Finally alighting in strange countries, it forgets to trust itselfnaturally enough. For the nature of pure brainwork is to be swift, farreaching and sharply limited.

Who could ever surmise the totality of this pond? What mind could en-

compass it? Beginning with the day it first began, what have been its weathers and its creatures? What of its microscopic life and its plants? What of all the thousands of men, from Indian times, who stood where I stand now; what have they felt and thought and acted out along the edges of this pond? White water lilies, dark-leaved, ride the wind-purpled pond at rest. We see them as if in a dream, but they are real. There was once a great painter of water dragons who worked only from hearsay.

Taking pity on his blindness, a real dragon swam up out of the pond and appeared to the artist-who died of fright.

Life as we live it is tragic because it is unreal. Born to reality, living to penetrate reality, we refuse even to believe in it.

What has been the relation of science to reality? The ancient Greeks paced out certain measurements of earth and built from there. They drew, of course, on Egyptian surveying methods, developed to keep track

of the constantly changing relations between the Nile and the land. Underlying all the. changes, the Egyptians had found, were certain unchanging geometric principles. These the Greeks refined, clarified and organized. Greek geometry still is taught-more or less by rote-to .school children. We learn geometric principles as facts merely, but the Greeks saw them as absolutes, awesomely pure and eternal.

On cloud terraces of mind the Greeks laid the speculative foundations of science. Then there were the mediaeval and Renaissance alchemists, who failed apparently for lack of rigour. They multiplied their problems in the laboratory as a nervous cook heaps on spices. Often, too, they felt a mystical rapport with their materials and, instead of watching the pot, they would be praying. Modern science rests on more strictly controlled experiments. The bulk of its equipment is designed to eliminate extraneous factors. Moreover, until a few years ago the experimenter himself was considered fairly extraneous to his experiment. But now science is beginning to demonstrate increased respect for human experience-that is, for what happens between the experimenter and the experiment being performed. The eyes of science continue to peer bleakly into laboratory experiments as if from outer space, or now and then peek into a sort of mailbox for messages. Yet the minds behind those chill eyes burn with a newly subjective urgency that no mere data can satisfy.

Calculating machines, which were supposed for a moment to make human calculations comparatively suspect, are proving suspect themselves. Being peculiarly a prey to "noise" or static in various elusive forms, they seldom get precisely the right answer to difficult questions.

And when the machine's answer is way off, the question must be rephrased. This requires putting the seer back into science. Only men who can guess very close to hidden truths ask rewaTding questions.

What fabulous answers flow to our control rooms! What new worlds appear! The alchemist's old dream is child's play compared to this-not worth the candle. The physicist makes things more potent than gold, and he finds facts past prophesying. Yet he will be the first to point out that not even science can penetrate far into nature. Any man's conceptions Blue is blue and a triangle is a triangle.

One can know these things without sensing their truth. The sense of truth comes with human experience in time and space.

are limited, the argument runs, to what his five senses tell him. Truth, pragmatically considered, is what can be proved. Man obviously is far too limited a creature to construct an all-inclusive theory of reality; and even if he had the theory, he could never build a laboratory complex enough to prove it. Science shines ever brighter in an ever-widening darkness, illuminating far more problems than it penetrates. There is such a thing as the scientific predicament.

Also there is such a thing as the sense of truth. What can never be proved in a laboratory may be proved in any moment of a man's own life.

Blue is blue and a triangle is a triangle.

One can know these things, however, without sensing their truth. The sense of truth comes with human experience in time and space. It comes with growing blue morningglories or constructing a sailboat.

Then, oddly enough, the absolutes of the Greeks, the subjective proto-

science of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and finally the strict data processing of modern science all merge in one's mind. So also do the five senses through which reality pours.

A man remains his own best chemist and crucible. Acting on this, he has the sense of truth.

An eminent physicist has taken issue with me here. After a recent conversation between us he sent me the following note: "My link with you is through our common belief in the reality of the subjective and the joy of the immediate. We part company when you become abstract and want to give me a sense of truth.

To me it is as welcome as an extra head. My own concern is more for beauty. I would rather contemplate a mature oak in the gentle rain than comprehend the chemistry of chlorophyll or the action of gravity."

That is his viewpoint and, with all due respect, I find it a sentimental one -not only sentimental but also symptomatic of our times. Truth and beauty are like brothers; it is we who divide them. The scientist muses dumbly on a tree while the poet

wistfully shrugs off simple mechanics and chemistry. The moments when music and meaning merge-when truth and beauty join-are continuous. It is our fault that we feel them so rarely.

A man's best moments embrace two activities at once-the first resthetic and the second intellectual. Only at such times may he comprehend the chlorophyll in the foliage and the gravity in the rain without losing sight of the vision as a whole. Goethe said that any form correctly seen is beautiful. He had the sense of truth.

The old sign that appears on United States one-dollar bills-the eye in the apex of a pyramid-well symbolizes scientific vision, which is intellectual vision. The sense of truth requires besides this a more sensuous, varied and personal view of nature, which might in its turn be symbolized by the Chinese calligraph for the word "see"-an eye on legs.

The ancient Chinese recognized not four elements but five. They found the same four that Empedocles noted and then inscrutably added wood. I have never seen a reason given for this. Perhaps they wanted

five elements to balance the five senses. And wood carries in itself the principle of growth, which the classical elements, taken separately, lack.

Heraclitus, a father of science as we know it, moved in the opposite direction from the Chinese. He boldly reduced the elements to a primal one -fire. Heraclitus lived in Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor, between Athens and Suss. Presumably then his thought was coloured in part by the fireworshipping Persians. Logical and extreme, he taught that a pond with migrating ducks and water lilies, or an oak tree in the gentle rain, or what you will, are all composed of one and the same fire-that saint and fire are one, that air, sea and land are all ablaze continually, and that humanity is a sort of sparkling.

Physicists find this proposition increasingly plausible and attractive.

It has simplicity on its side and also finality. Fire, as Blake sang, "gives its light and gives its heat away."

The second law of thermodynamics spells eventual exhaustion-a cold "heat death"-for the entire cosmos.

Mathematically considered, order tends to disorder. Thus, in a famous example, a perfectly stacked deck of cards gets increasingly disrupted when shuffled. Yet scattered seeds will create new order. Here is a conflict which contemporary science tends to resolve in favour of hopelessness.

Nature may seem to be a sweet and graceful dancing of life with death; but, science says, the pattern of the dance has all been determined to lead us back through chaos to certain destruction. In classical times such determinism gave rise to stoicism"Whatever will be will be"-a philosophy for slaves. The latest breed of stoics-"logical positivists"-are, if anything, even less positive and more abject.

Science measures, predicts, exploits and manipulates the course of things.

Hence scientists are tempted to con¡ sider truth nothing but a conglomeration of things, about which we happen to have ideas. This temptation they generally resist, and for an excellent reason. If truth exists only on the material plane, whence come our ideas? From the realm of illusion?

Religion and philosophy concern the spirit; hence men of the cloth or

rake fire, that holiest of elements, pouredinto this world from the sur .... !fo know how far one has fallen rrom the real element, one has only to think pfpin wheels when a boy, or in autumn of tfle ive burning of the leaves on the trees.

"The

moments

when truth

and beauty join are continuous.

It is our fault that we feel them so rarely."

of cap and gown are tempted to think of truth as a purely spiritual thing, a matter of ideas to which the physical world corresponds. But if the correspondence between spiritual and material be exact, where lies the distinction between them? And if, on the contrary, it be inexact, then is matter false? In the Orient, and sometimes in the Occident as well, the philosophers' answer to this question has been, "Yes, matter is false or, rather, illusory." But as Samuel Johnson demonstrated, a stubbed toe suffices to upset that notion.

his mind. To treat him as the rightful custodian of nature would be unfortunate. Nature belongs to all men, as every scientist who has a poet in him knows.

Another down-to-earth observation of Doctor Johnson's was that in putting on a pair of pants it makes no difference which leg goes in first.

That idea applies precisely to the quest for a sense of truth. One may begin with either material or spiritual reality, so long as one ends with both together. In the end, the sense of truth requires only a firm hold on the fact that the tree in the rain and the tree in the brain are both true-and that each completes the other.

Who are the contemporary poets?

Mostly script writers, copy writers, song writers, speech writers, publicists and columnists. Gibbon, describing the secret rot of Rome's Augustan age, remarks in passing that "a cloud of commentators darkened the land."

It is the same today. Again, as in Rome, the so-called major poets are more scholars than poets. They look backward. They conclude. This holds for Joyce, for Pound, for T. S. Eliot's "Shakespeherian Rag."

In a surviving fragment Heraclitus noted that all things are determined and that men must act as if they were not. I should like to expand Heraclitus' statement as follows: All mere things, perhaps, are determined. Yet men '¡must act as if they were not.

So long as any man possesses and acts upon the sense of truth he learns freedom.

Better a forward-looking science than mere scholarship, and it may well appear, over the years, that the enduring poets of the twentieth century have been men of science. One thinks of Freud and Jung. Dante's Divine Comedy is a poem which he intended partly as a treatise. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams on the other hand is a treatise which, despite the author's intentions, becomes poetry. What dates in each is like a discarded snakeskin, sloughed off by the living truth.

Look at the rising sun; there God does live, And gives His light, and gives His heat away, And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning , joy in the nool1day.

The best poets are those who speak comprehensibly of incomprehensible things. Scientists, on the other hand, speak in riddles about things that soon will be understood by all. Science is becoming a cult; let us learn everything we can from it except its pride, obscurity and chill doubts. The scientist is a man of arcane, special and hard-won lore. His heavy load of learning may oppress and darken

Just as much as science needs poetry, so does poetry need science.

The sad fact, however, is that only a handful of scientists "find time" to read Blake or even Shakespeare, and only a handful of poets "find time" to acquaint themselves with the rudiments of physics or biology. The rest let lack of time turn them into half-minded men.

Man's greatest discoveries are always made in nature-in living nature-by men for whom knowledge and feeling merge. Newton, needless to say, did not invent gravity, he discovered its principle in nature.

Yet the run of scientists tend to treat nature as the living proof of science, and this is not the same thing at all.

The high-school science student finds himself a million or more light years out in space, and the chances are that he will never return. Meeting experts on every plane except the human, he learns to think of the very elements in which man moves and lives, the very elements of which

Span

August 1961

41

mankind is shaped, as mere abstractions. There now exist in scientific terminology more than 100 "elements" and about a third as many "elementary particles." Their infinitesimal differences have got to be recognized; meanwhile, they have ceased to be elementary. For me the elementary elements remain the classic ones that I experience.

In chemistry water is H20. But H20 is only a formula relating to water. Water is water, different all the time-in clouds and cups, cascades, birdbaths, puddles, Mississippis, gulfs and mountainous ocean, and in ice cubes and the garden hose.

The Navajo Indians have dozens of nouns for water, being a desert people.

There is water in the body-rivers of all kinds entwined. Heracles once broke the horn of a river rival, wrestling, and with Apollo's aid, Achilles bore down frothing Scamander. Gentler waters also come to mind-Undine, the water babies and that mermaid who cautioned a little boy to undress lest he get wet. One thinks of baptism, holy drops, and then raindrops racing down a train window, tears, drops of sweat and the pure globes of water carried home like bubbles from a sacred spring.

Or take fire, that holiest of elements, poured into this world from the sun, which is our life. A city man's closest contact with fire may come with lighting cigarettes. Or if the furnace goes out on a winter's day, he may descend for a disgusted look at the ashes. But to know how far one has fallen from the real element, one has only to think of Roman candles and pin wheels when a boy, or in autumn of the live burning of the leaves on the trees. Or one may chance to glance into the sun, or to think of fire-defying heroes such as Siegfried, or that grim Roman who burned off his own hand to prove a point of honour. Joan of Arc knew fire, knew it well. Such nostalgic and heroic associations would be just the beginning of fire conceived as a whole experience. They say that if the sun were encased in ice forty feet thick, it would melt all that ice in a minute.

Some calculation! From the "Greek fire" that preserved Byzantium to the razing of Hiroshima, fire has remained

I have an ancient Athenian coin oj silver ....

It casts its light upon the waters oj my soul.

I have experienced this coin, and fhe experience comprises a totality.

the very brow of war. And all the iron sinews of this age are fireforged.

Poets take to the fiery element as naturally as salamanders-Homer, Virgil, John ofPatmos, Dante, Milton, Blake. There are the many, many ritual uses of fire, from yule log to Olympic torch. On Persian peaks the Magi nurtured deathless flames. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush. These are but flickering, fiery thoughts.

The whole joy and purpose of living is living-that is, experiencing reality.

Children know it well and, in general, they live best. A child's feeling about life is as immediate and ephemeral as life itself. He neither knows nor needs to know that he will die; he lives as if each hour might be his last, and thus he learns more every hour. Whereas we who set ourselves to learn some one thing for future use find it harder every day. Better perhaps to do as the child does and bring everything we have to present experience, to experience in depth.

"Count no man happy," said Solon, "until he be dead." I would count those happy who are happy and also ready for death. To store up riches, fame, power or knowledge unused is to blink away the prospect of death and be made a sad fool at the end.

Happiness is a little boy dancing about a lawn sprinkler on a June afternoon.

To see that boy in sun and splash is to know that one has never experienced the Elgin marbles at the British Museum, simply because they are indoors. We should have more respect for the interplay of elements and kingdoms in nature. Not only are the marbles themselves such an interplay-between animal and mineral-but they need as well the blessing fires of sun and moon and the waters of heaven. If out of doors they weather away over the centuries, let them.

Museum people frequently refer to their collections as "material," meaning primarily material for scholars.

Scholars themselves are material for scholarship, and scholarship in my view is material for one thing onlythe deepening of direct experience.

Everyone has felt the sudden, sweet, intense delight that comes with first seeing an inspired painting or poem.

To derive everything possible from the masterpiece, there must follow hours of contemplation and cool study. One learns as much about the thing as one can and then goes on to speculate, not stopping at knowledge either.

Finally one puts all that one has learned and imagined out of mind, to gaze with fresh eyes. Only then

can understanding come and delight return to stay.

I have an ancient Athenian coin of silver, a drachma commemorating the Battle of Marathon. The warriorgoddess shines and smiles in my hand.

I toss her, and she comes down the owl, symbol of dark, swooping thought. Who sculpted this? Who struck it off? Who has held it and spent it, and for what things? My first still pleasure in the beauty of the coin turns to adventure on the bloodand-silver seas of history. I think of Marathon, the air alive with arrows and the dying runner with his eternal message. I think of Socrates, that hard old optimist, and his teasing ways.

He may have held this coin and pressed his thumb to the goddess's lean, smiling cheek. This drachma may have purchased Scythian slaves or ivory from India or perhaps a fat black wine-skin, filled with forgetful music, from next door. It was one of a heap in a dooryard game of knucklebones. It stopped a dead man's tongue once; Charon brought it back.

And I, coming back to present life now with the coin still in my hand, see it as if for the first and last time.

It was beautiful before; but now, how much more beautiful! And more than ever an object. To contemplate a thing deeply and imaginatively will never adulterate that thing in itself.

Quite the contrary; put thought away, gaze again upon the thing in itself, and it shines truer than before. Putting the drachma back in my pocket, I close my eyes and watch it rise on the horizon of interior vision.

It casts its light upon the waters of my soul. I have experienced this coin, and the experience comprises a totality.

Heraclitus can be known in part, and his thoughts either proved or disproved. But my drachma cannot be known or disproved; it can only be experienced. It is not a thought centre but a life centre, as mysterious as was the pond with its water lilies and migrating ducks. Both purple pond and silver coin remain forever beyond intellectual comprehension, in their entirety, and yet rest easily within the heart. We can never hope for totalities of knowledge; yet we can have, often, totalities of experience. It is a matter of trusting the experience-not myself, not the object of my experience, but the experience itself.

The sense of truth arises from such trust. For truth is nature, and nature is experience .•

(cJ 1960 by Tile Curtis Publishing Company.

The Saturday Evening Post.

T HE ancient science of astronomy has acquired a new significance at this crucial time in the history of man. He

In the backgroilnd is Yerkes Observatory where Saleh M. Alladin, Indian astronomer, is taking adranced studies. The observatory, which was built between 1895 and 1897, is located at Lake Geneva, Illinois, and is a component of the University of Chicago.

ALLADIN

AT YERKES Dr. Van Biesbroeck, Professor Emeritus, Department of Astronomy, University of Chicago, and Mr. Alladin, discuss tfle adjustment of the main telescope at Yerkes Observatorya forty-inch refracting telescope, the largest of its type in the world.

once scanned the heavens in a dubious attempt to interpret the mysterious influence of stars on his life. But today, with vastly more powerful and sensitive instruments at his command, he tries to fathom the secrets of space in his quest for ever-widening knowledge of the universe and to secure his ultimate access to strange, new worlds.

One of the most famous observatories in the East, which owes its origin to the foresight and enthusiasm of the late Nawab Zafar Jung, is the Nizamiah Observatory, Hyderabad. The Nawab visited Europe when the first International Astronomers Conference was held in Paris at the end of the 19th century and purchased a variety of scientific eq',lipment including two large 8-inch and 15-inch telescopes. These telescopes were later presented to Hyderabad State and formed the nucleus of the Nizamiah Observatory. The observatory, which is an adjunct of Osmania University, has since recorded considerable progress. By charting over 800,000 stars in the southern skies, it has made an invaluable contribution to astronomical science. The observatory's importance is enhanced by the fact that it is the only major observatory in the world in its latitude.

The research work of the Nizamiah Observatory will receive further impetus when a 48-inch reflector telescope, now in the final stages of construction in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is installed at the observatory. The estimated cost of this telescope, which is expected to be the most powerful between Cairo and Tokyo, is $230,000 and will be met from funds provided under the India Wheat Loan Educational Exchange Programme, an Indo-U.S. cooperative programme to promote higher education.

Two astronomer graduates from Osmania University have been receiving advanced training in the United States, under the same programme. One of them is Mr. Saleh Mohamed Alladin, who has been at the Yerkes Observatory, of the University of Chicago, for the past year or more.

On his return to India, Mr. Saleh Mohamed Alladin is tentatively scheduled to be posted as Assistant Astronomer at Nizamiah Observatory and Lecturer on Astronomy at Osmania University .•

The telescope'is only one of the tools which are importallt to the work of an astronomer. At left, with a fel/ow student, Mr. AI/adin examines a reducing camera.

Below, consulting synchronized chronometers, he records observations taken with a telescope, of which there are several at Yerkes Observatory. The comptometer, bottom right, is as important to modern astronomical studies as the telescope.

Saleh AI/adin, at left, adjusts the sixty-two-foot-Iong telescope for observations. The Yerkes Observatory was conceived by the late George E. Hale, an eminent astronomer who was then head of the Department of Astronomy of the new Unil1ersity of Chicago.

He persuaded Charles T. Yerkes, a Chicago financier, to pay the cost of a forty-inch telescope. Construction of the observatory was begun in 1895 and completed two years later. It was designed

by Henry Ives Cobb from plans originated by Dr. Hale.

Its larger dome is ninety feet in diameter and rotates. Its floor, seventy-five feet in diameter, rises through a range of twenty-three Jeet.

MASTER ARCHITECT F

RANK Lloyd Wright was born in 1869 in the small midwestern town of Richland Centre, Wisconsin. His father was a musician turned minister; his mother, of Welsh ancestry, was a school teacher. In later years he wrote that it was his mother who imbued him with the idea of being an architect.

He was determined to become "the greatest architect of all time" and never deviated from that ambition.

He was so impatient to get on with the task, in fact, that he left the University of Wisconsin engineering school shortly before graduation to seek practical training. He found it, in 1887, in the Chicago workshop of Louis Sullivan, the revolutionary architect who taught him the basic 46

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principles of his craft. This was one of the few professional debts Wright freely acknowledged.

It was from Sullivan that Wright derived the concept that "form follows function" in building. He expressed this functionalism in principles he developed as "organic architecture," of building from the inside out, of using natural materials to identify or "unify" the structure with its environment. For Wright, "organic architecture was a searching for realities-a word I love because I love the sense of life it stands for, the ten-fingered grasp of things it implies .... I never build houses on top of a hill. I build them around it, like a brow .... "

From the beginning, Wright devoted himself to the problem which became his chief interest-the house as a place to live. He built the first one for himself and his bride, the former Catherine Tobin, whom he married when he was 21. In the early 1900's, he began to design low-slung streamlined houses with broad, horizontal lines, massive chimneys and slablike walls that hugged the earth in a "marriage with the ground." In an era of ornate mansions, they caused a sensation, especially in Europe where they gained the architect immediate recognition. Though it took years for Wright to achieve acclaim in his own country, in time the "prairie architecture" was accepted and set

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Beautiful buildings are works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or an averaging by the committee mind.

the pattern for the contemporary American "ranch" home.

Asked many years later how he managed to survive such life-long battles against tradition, Wright had a ready reply. "The history of every artist is this," he said. "At first people discover you, and everything you do is wondrous. Then they begin to look for your feet of clay, and everything you do is berated. But if you live long enough, you become an old master."

He paused to let the lesson sink in.

"At last," he added, "I am an old master. " Following his initial fame, Wright fell from grace into a period when his personal affairs became tempestuous and his work was relatively neglected -approximately between 1910 and 1937. Still, under varying circumstances, he built several of his most famous structures during this period.

One of these was "Taliesin," the country ,home and studio that stands on a commanding site overlooking the Wisconsin River in the rolling country near his birthplace. Gradually, the place grew and became a workshop and school tor apprenticearchitects from all parts of the world.

When Wright decided that the severity of the mid-western winters hampered work at Taliesin on an all-year round basis, he augmented it with Taliesin West, a winter workshop in the Arizona desert.

••When you go into 0 place of worship, you ought to feel as if you were in the hands of God ... a mountain of light. We chose white glass.

Let God put his colours on.

He's the great artist.

When the weather is sunny, the temple will glitter like gold.

At night, under a moon, it will be silvery. On a gray day, it will be gray. When the heavens are blue, there will be a soft blue over it."

BETH SHOLEM

SYNAGOGUE,

ELKINS PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

Probably the most notable work of this period was the Im.perial Hotel in Tokyo, designed at the request of the Emperor of Japan. A special problem. for the architect here was the earthquakes that periodically visit Japan. Wright solved the problem through a unique use of concrete supports, cantilevered floors, and a foundation floating on a cushion of mud. In a lavish structure that was reminiscent of monumental Aztec building, he added courtyard pools not primarily for ornament but to hold adequate water in case of fire.

Proof of the architect's structural genius came two years after the hotel was' completed.

During the heavy

earthquakes that rocked the city in 1923, the Imperial Hotel was one of only a few major buildings in Tokyo which escaped serious damage.

This same structural soundness, put to the test in other buildings he designed, finally melted some of the opposition to Wright's work in his own country. His marital and financial affairs, which had been quite involved, became more stable. Following a divorce from his first wife, a brief second marriage in 1923 to Miriam. Noel, a sculptress, also terminated by divorce, he married for a third time in 1928. This marriage to Olga Lazovich, a Montenegrin, lasted to his death.

•• I think of my work as organic architecture and in the preparation of organic architecture there is necessary constant association with the elements of nature.

I believe the cultures of the past are a distinct asset to our present civilization and these assets should not be put aside ....

If we build in the desert. let the house know the desert and the desert be proud of the house by making the house an extension of the desert."

By the mid-1930¡s. Wright began to obtain all increasing number of commissions. Two major buildings contributed enormously to his stature and helped turn public opinion once again in his favour. One was the Johnson Wax Company building in Racine, Wisconsin, with its streamlined exterior and its interior featuring mushroom-shaped concrete columns.

The almost fragile in appearance. other was "Fallingwater," the house cantilevered over a waterfall in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, which is considered by many critics to be the most beautiful and. certainly, the most dramatic. of all the architect's houses.

As he took on more and more

projects of every sort-churches, schools, factories. cui tural and civic centres. houses. a theatre. an art museum-Wright continued to express himself in works that were radically different from traditional architecture. He moved easily from his early designs, which opened the living areas of a house so that interior and exterior space flowed together, to his later period in which the basic rectangular form of a structure disappeared entirely. Thus he devised a circular house, an elliptical house, triang'llar churches, a hexagonal synagogue and, as his last major work, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City, a structure consisting of a continuous ramp spiralling up in

ever-widening loops around an inner circular court.

Toward the end of his life, despite a long-avowed antipathy toward high buildings, he proposed a mile-high skyscraper. It was designed with a "tap-root" foundation, a main core penetrating far enough into the ground to reach rock or hard-pan formations, making stability possible. It was the architect's hope that the vertical structure would replace many conventional buildings-cages as he called them-and provide space for landscaped open areas. This project was never carried out, however.

Though Wright continued to arouse controversy in all his efforts and was frequently accused of sacrificing form to function, utility to effect, in his later years he received many awards acknowledging his extensive contributions to architecture. Even the American Institute of Architects, a favourite target for his most caustic comments, took a long term view and, in 1949, presented him with its gold medal, the profession's highest award.

The citation called him a "titanic force" among builders. When he died in April 1959, aged 89, at Phoenix, Arizona, he was engaged in more work than ever before in his lifetime.

He had truly become, as he well knew, "an old master.".

Beautiful buildings are more than scientific.

They are true organisms, ,.spiritually

conceived.