Science: Merchant Archeologist

Browner than unbleached muslin was Charles L. Bernheimer, 65, Manhattan cotton merchant, when he returned to work last week. For a month he had been exploring the rocky district where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico join each other at right angles. It was his fourteenth expedition in the Southwest and the seventh he had financed for the American Museum of Natural History. The museum’s Barnum Brown accompanied him, and the Carnegie Institution’s Earl H. Morris. They found evidence that the extinct Basket Makers, Aborigines who preceded the Cliff Dwellers, used cotton for their textiles, inner bark of the squawberry bush for their baskets. A grooved boomerang with a handle suggested a remote connection between the Basket Makers and the boomerang throwers of Australia. On this trip he secured two boxes of dinosaur bones.

Mr. Bernheimer has been a man of many projects and activities. One of his accomplishments was his revision in 1913 of New York’s state banking laws, which have not been amended since. His boast was that no private bank had failed since the revision became effective. However, the law does not cover all forms of banking. While he was absent digging in the Southwest, the unsupervised banking house of Clarke Bros., Manhattan, failed for $5,000,000 (TIME, July 22).

Another idea of his was “A Business Man’s Plan for Settling the War in Europe,” developed in 1915. The nations ignored it. But some of his suggestions have grown into the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War proclaimed at the White House last week. However the civilian honored by invitation to watch the ceremony was not Charles L. Bernheimer. but Salmon Oliver Levinson, also a Jew, who has developed similar thoughts more strongly, more largely (TIME, Aug. 5).