Science: Expeditions: Jul. 5, 1926

Summer is expedition time for scientists. They have catalogued and putaway in glass cases their last year’s finds. They have written their reports and monographs, given their lectures, attended to home duties, and the irresistible itch to fare forth exploring, examining, collecting is upon them again.

The Smithsonian Institution of Washington, greatest of all expedition-senders,has announced many new projects, five being of prime interest:

Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka is off to search the shores of Kotzebue and Norton Sounds, Alaska, for traces of battlegrounds storied in Eskimo legend, where Asian ancestors of the Indians may have fought among themselves during successive waves of migration across the icefields from Siberia and the Diomede Islands.

Dr. Richard P. Strong of Harvard, with Smithsonian assistants, is to cross Africa from Liberia to Mombasa studying diseases of men, plants, animals. (The University of Witwatersrand, Transvaal, lately sent far and wide through Africa for specimens of herbs, roots, flowers, barks, saps used by ebon witchdoctors in their religious rites, to discover new medicinal agents.)

Meteorologist William H. Hoover was recalled from a solar observatory in the Argentine to travel to Mt. Brukkaros in Southwest Africa where Dr. Charles G. Abbott of the National Geographic Society, after studying sites in the Sahara, Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula and Baluchistan, last year discovered an ideal spot for the Institution’s first sun station in the Eastern Hemisphere. For three years Mr. Hoover will live, beneath a cloudless, dustless sky, in the Brukkaros crater, with a 60-ft. precipice for his doorstep and only Hottentots for neighbors. He will take daily readings from a bolometer capable of registering to a millionth of a degree the sun’s radiation. His daily telegrams to Washington will be studied by long-range weather-forecasters,who, working on the theory that fluctuations in solar heat occasion all terrestrial weather disturbances, will warn farmers, mariners, aeronauts and the parent planning his child’s picnic, of coming storms.

Dr. Matthew W. Stirling has already accomplished much of the purpose of the Institution’s expedition to explore and map the pygmy-inhabitedheart of New Guinea by airplane.

Mineralogist W. F. Foshag is making the first scientific survey of the world’s richest silver mines, in Mexico. Workings begun centuries ago by the Toltecs still produce voluminously. At Guanajuato, 12 hours from Mexico City, Dr. Foshag will visit the huge Veta Madre (Mother Vein) where the work shaft is 1,700 ft. deep and 30 in diameter through solid rock. He will see the magnificent Cathedral of Chihuahua, built in the 18th Century by two escaped convicts who, having stumbled upon the mines now called for Santa Eulalia, promised the edifice to a priest if he would intercede for them with the Government.

Polar. The dirigible Norge having crossed the North Pole and reached Alaska (TIME, May 24), Poleflyer Richard Evelyn Byrd headed home from Spitzbergen; Explorer Darcis of France decided to wait a year before venturing over the top of the globe with motor-sledges; Poleflyer Hubert Wilkins was recalled from Point Barrow. Talk immediately began about flying to the South Pole. Byrd announced his intention of attempting this feat. Engineer Antonio Pauly of the Argentine submitted to his Government complete plans for a flight to the South Pole and exploration of Antarctica. But no definite expedition has yet been announced.

Sub-Polar. Explorer Donald B. McMillan has sailed once more for his special province, the shores of Labrador and Greenland to study Norse relics. George Palmer Putnam II, made restless, perhaps, by books he has published for Explorer William Beebe,* and urged on by his small son, David Binney Putnam, who last year cruised to Galapagos, is financing and accompanying a Greenland collecting cruise for the American Museum of Natural History. Besides Publisher Putnam and David, those aboard the schooner Effie Morrissey include: Robert E. Peary Jr. and his late explorer-father’s skipper, Captain Bob Bartlett; Carl Dunrud, Montana cowpuncher, equipped with lariats to throw at sea-lions, seals, musk-oxen; Van Campen Heilner, museum ornithologist; and Arthur Young, archer, who proposes to transfix with his arrows, polar bears, walruses and small whales, just as he impaled deer and lions in Africa last winter.

Another northward bound expedition is that of William A., 29-year-old grandnephew of John D. Rockefeller. With an American Museum ornithologist and a writer from the Scientific American young Rockefeller is already in the Hudson’s Bay region spying on nesting birds, nosing out Eskimo curios. No blare of press-agentry accompanied their departure. Having had a taste of the North at Dr. Grenfell’s mission in Labrador in 1915, Rockefeller merely slipped out of Manhattan for a vacation enlivened by light studies.

Professor Howard T. Barnes of McGill University has had to change his plan for going to Greenland shores to “burn up” icebergs with thermit (TIME, March 1 et seq.), the University of Michigan’s expeditionunder Professor William Herbert Hobbs, which Professor Barnes was to have accompanied, having been canceled. Professor Barnes has gone instead to summer on the east coast of Newfoundland for a scientific study of iceberg ice. Structural knowledge of ice is the basis of his work in destroying ice-jams or cakes with the heat suddenly released when thermit (aluminum powder and a metallic peroxide) is touched off by a ribbon of flaming magnesium. Sudden heat acts upon ice crystals, not only to melt them as is commonly supposed, but also to explode their texture, as smaller degrees of heat crack glass. Professor Barnes’ ultimate object: to shatter icebergs at their glacial source and rid shipping lanes of a grave menace.

South America. Expeditions to remote corners of the world are more and more becoming fashionable among wealthy folk as things to do instead of merely as things to finance. William K. Vanderbilt, amateur ichthyologist, cruised the Pacific last winter and brought home strange specimens in his yacht Ara (TIME, Apr. 12). Manufacturer Jesse Metcalf (woolens) is off to collect monster lizards at Komodo, Dutch East Indies, (TIME, March 22). George Eastman (kodaks) is in Africa hunting with his cameras (TIME, March 22). Last week, Mrs. Marshall Field of Chicago, in the role of official photographer, sailed with a Field Museum expedition bound for the game-infested interior of Brazil. It was her first venture of the kind but she admitted to no qualms at the thought of traveling 10,000 mi., of entering jungles never visited by white men. Seeing her off at the dock, her husband also denied uneasiness: “She is a splendid shot, you know.” To guide and protect her there were seven scientists under the command of famed George K. Cherrie, taxidermist and hunter of Roosevelt expeditions to the River of Doubt, Africa, Turkestan. To afford her feminine company and comfort there was Mrs. Ernest Thompson Seton, wife of Naturalist Seton, who exhibited a rifle “that already has to its credit a 1,000-lb. moose, an 800-lb. bear, an antelope shot running at 90 ft. and a wapiti.”

Other expeditions have lately returned from South America:

Dr. W. M. McGovern safely reached London after being missing for months at the headwaters of the Amazon. One of his comrades was drowned in a river whirlpool; he himself nigh died of a jungle rheum. Hostile tribes, insects, vampire bats and reptiles beset his wanderings but he survived with tales to tell of unsuspected gold, silver, coal and oil deposits; and of being initiated, at rites which no woman may attend, into a freemasonry of bronze-skinned jungle nomads. Dr. McGovern, who though still in his twenties has scoured the globe’s face from London to holy Lasa, was in time to authenticate a newspaper report of a Negro who stood barefoot on red-hot iron with apparent comfort.Dr. McGovern suggested that the Negro might have been an unsuspectedleper but at the same time told of having joined in personallyon a Shinto ceremony in Japan, where he thrice walked across a bed of blazing coals, to the great detriment of his clothes but without injury to his bare feet which were rubbed with salt.

Dr. Herbert S. Dickey of the Royal Geographic Society and his bride turned up last fortnight at Para, Brazil, after a busy honeymoon spent in crossing the Andes from Guayaquil, Ecuador; making cinema records of the art of curing human skulls among the savage, head-hunting Teveros.

Blossom. Early in June the schooner Blossom, financed by Clevelanders for their Museum of Natural History, dropped anchor at Charleston, S. C.,after an absence of 31 months. She had fished in the Sargasso Sea; dredged for “the lost continent, Atlantis,” in the eastern Atlantic; touched on the South American and African coasts for repairs and to collect plant and animal life. Her commander, George Finlay Simmons, set about discharging his cargo of 12,000 specimens under the direction of Paul M. Rea, Cleveland museum chief. Braving superstition, the Blossom’s men had shot an albatross, hooked a golden dolphin.

*TIME will shortly summarize archeological, paleontological and geological digging of recent weeks. Herewith are published activities of natural historians, botanists, mineralogists, etc.

*Latest of these books, telling the story and elaborating the discoveries of Beebe’s voyage to the Sargasso Sea,, the Humboldt current, Volcanic Galapagos and the prehistoric gorge of the Hudson (TIME, Feb. 16, 1925 et seq.) ; replete with descriptions and exquisite hand-painted color plates of extraordinary sea creatures, from pygmy sharks to titan devilfish; written in Explorer Beebe’s best scientifico-romantic vein —is THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE—William Beebe—Putnam ($6).