Science: Beebe

“With the Atlantic comfortably smooth, we are headed for the Sargasso Sea* and expect to resume our trawling and dredging there, which we had to abandon in March owing to high seas.” Such was last week’s, news of Explorer William Beebe, whose last wireless, reports (TIME, May 11) came from the neighborhood of Galapagos in the Pacific.

Meantime, a book appeared in the U. S.:

JUNGLE DAYS—William Beebe—Putnam ($3.00). A pattern of shot felled a yellow-headed vulture, which had swooped upon a spectacled owl, which had clenched (and been hugged dead by) an anaconda, which had bolted a basha (torpedo-shaped fish), which had snapped up a pok-poke (smoky jungle frog), in whose food canal lived an opalina (irridescent protozoan covered with hairlike flagella). Explorer William Beebe, who fired the shotgun, indicates this chain of life with his dissecting knife, philosophizing as he studies Nature in the steaming jungle of British Guiana. Other chapters—creeping, rustling, whirring, crashing, oozing with live things—centre on an inverted, deaf, lethargic, odorless, whistling sloth; the falling of jungle leaves; beachcombing at midnight; men and monkeys; a mangrove tree. His enthusiasm and patness often cast doubt upon Author Beebe’s scientific veracity, but insure excellent reading. The style, vivid and highly charged with verbs and adjectives as exotic as the boat-billed toucans on the book’s jacket, ranges from the masterly English of Galapagos and Jungle Nights, to sloppy jargon. In the midst of Author Beebe’s spells, one is continually jerked up by the wish that, on his present trawling trip to Galapagos, he may lose the word “adumbrate” forever overboard.

* An expanse of ocean bounded roughly by 25° and 30° N. and 38° and 60° W., which currents make a back-water accumulating flotsam. The masses and banks of sargassum weed impeded Columbus for a fortnight on his first voyage to the New World (September, 1492). Improbable tales are told of ships embedded permanently; of seamonsters that make the spot their home. Smaller sargassum drifts are found north of Hawaii, southeast of New Zealand, southwest of Australia.