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A Paying Guest

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A Paying Guest Source: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1925), pp. 445-447 Published by: American Association for the Advancement of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7408 . Accessed: 02/05/2014 10:05 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Association for the Advancement of Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Scientific Monthly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.132.123.28 on Fri, 2 May 2014 10:05:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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Page 1: A Paying Guest

A Paying GuestSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1925), pp. 445-447Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7408 .

Accessed: 02/05/2014 10:05

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Association for the Advancement of Science is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to The Scientific Monthly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.132.123.28 on Fri, 2 May 2014 10:05:11 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: A Paying Guest

TIIE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 445

[t is, therefore, about as large as the Dead Sea but only a sixth as deep below sea-level. The evaporation rate at Salton Sea is about half that of the Dead Sea, so the total theoretical horse-power obtainable by running into the Salton Sea from the Gulf of California, ninety miles distant, all the water that can be evaporated away would not produce over 35,000 horse-power. But it is useless to talk about the project anyhow, for the Californians would lynch any one who proposed to turn the Salton Sea into a salt sea permanently, when it could be better used as farming land. They are determined that no more water shall be run into their sink.

The idea of making a sea out of the Sahara was much discussed in the last century, not for the purposes of power, but to open up the heart of Africa to navigation, make a seaport out of Timbuctoo, and ameliorate the climate. It was argued that it was only necessary to cut through a narrow rim of north Africa and let in the waters of the Mediterranean, which would form there a second Mediterranean, surrounded by fertile shores and flourishing cities. The British protested that flooding the Sahara would divert the Gulf Stream into the Straits of Gibraltar and leave Eng- land as cold as Labrador.

But both the hopes and the fears vanished when some one took the trouble to look at a topographic map of Africa and observed that the average altitude of land proposed to be submerged was over a thousand feet. Only a very small portion of the Sahara is below sea level; certain salt marshes in southern Tunis and half a dozen oases in eastern Libya, and these were only from fifty to a hundred feet below the Mediterranean.

So the great project for the navigation of the Sahara collapsed and is now principally remembered because it afforded Ibsen a theme for one of Peer Gynt's chimerical schemes. This is his vision as a penniless castaway in Morocco:

'The sea's to the west; it lies piled up behind me, Dammed out from the desert by a sloping ridge."

"Dammed out? It wants but a gap, a canal,- Like a flood of life would the waters rush In through the channel, and fill the desert! Soon would the whole of yon red-hot grave Spread forth, a breezy and rippling sea. The oases would rise in the midst, like islands; Atlas would tower in green cliffs on the north: Sailing ships would, like stray birds on the wing, Skim to the south, on the caravans' track."

"The southland, behind the Sahara 's wall, Would make a new seaboard for civilization. Steam would set Timbuctoo 's factories spinning."

"Skirting a bay, on a shelving strand, I'll build the chief city, Peeropolis. The world is decrepit! Now comes the turn Of Gyntiana, my virgin land!"

A PAYING GUEST

A NEW and startling theory of how we got our good red blood is advanced by Mr. Needham, of Cambridge. He suggests that the red corpuscles, now a necessary factor in animal life, first entered as foreign invaders in search of food. Sometime

back in the Pre-Cambrian, he surmises, when the ancestors of all mammals were still swimimng in the sea and had not yet closed their circulatory system, they were penetrated by certain single and free-swimming cells,

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Page 3: A Paying Guest

446 'HE SC( IENTIFIC 3IONTIILY

DR. CLARENCE C LI .TT F

ELECTED PRES-'IDY,,NT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MDICHIGA~N, W\HILE OCCUPYING THE

PRESIDENCY OFP TH-E UNIVERSITY OF MAINE. PREVIOUSLY ]DR. LITTLE WAS

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE STATION FOR EXPERIMENTAL EVOLUTION OF TIEI

CARNEGIE INSTITU-TIONT WHERE H-E CARRIED ON'~ IMNPORTA-NT WORK IN. GEN'~ETICS

W .i_lih, finding lIere abundance of nitrogenous iiutrimeit, made themselves at lomie and in timie became inidispenisable to their hiost. They swallowed tIle red coloring- matter, a waste product which hiad been hiard to get rid of, an-d used this as a Iniediumi for carryving, fresh oxygeni from- the lunigs to the muscles, so whlen the creature took to livinig on- land it was able to make full use of the free air it found thiere.

Many such cases of partnership for mutual benefit are known to bio!- ogists, wh-lo call thje arrangemielnt "syNmbiosis." Certain sea-wormis oper-ate a system closely corresponding to th1is hypothetical seme. Being1 d'1id of chliorophyll, the green coloring matter of plan-ts, they hiave Hio wvay o-f manufacturinig sugary foods for thlemselves. But after theyv are infected with the small greeni cells of certain algae the nieeds of both are satisfied. The green guests prepare carbohydrates by aid of thle sunshine and in tuirn live on the protein products of their hlosts.

But if the green plant cells fail to keep up the food supply the animal gets hungry, and digests tIle vegetablle iiivaders, although this means sui-

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Page 4: A Paying Guest

TIlE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 447

cide. Somethinig of this sort happens in the animal body, when the red blood corpuscles dissolve and disappear faster than they can be replaced, "pernicious anemia" the doctors call it. But the person who shows such ingratitude to the uninvited guests that have become such useful servants is sure to suffer for it.

BLOOD RELATIONS

IN

PLANT FAMILIES

PLANTS have no blood, yet a German botanist has found it possible to use their juices to determine their real relationships just as comparative tests on the blood of animals show which are nearest of kin. -He has shown by this method of serum diag-

nosis that, for example, the common milkwort displays affinity with the heather, bittersweet and horse-chestnut families; the bear-berry with the heather, bittersweet, milkwort and grape families.

What the test actually shows is merely that the proteins of these plants are similar in composition, but from this an actual family kinship, coming from a common ancestry, may be reasonably inferred. Hitherto, botanists have had no way of ascertaining the family connections of plants, and so they have classified plants according to their external forms and features, such as the number of the petals, the shape of the leaves, and the, like. But this is an uncertain svstem since plants of recent species may develop close resemblances in appearance and structure when grown under similar climatic conditions. The new chemical method of classification by compo- sition is likely to lead to safer conclusions.

Using the serum test on animials it has been found that the blood of man corresponds more closely to that of the large tailless apes of the Old World than to the smaller tailed monkeys of the New World, while the blood of other animals differs decidedly from human blood.

PICTURE

TELEGRAPHY

WHENEVER an author writes a romance of Utopian life some centuries in the future he introduces as one of the marvelous inventions of that period an instrument for seeing what is going on at a dis- tance. Usually it is modeled after the telephone

with a disk in which one can see mirrored the scene at the other end of the wire. I do not remember that any of these novelists of the twenty-first century and after have dared to discard the wire, which shows how difficult it is nowadays for the imagination to get ahead of the facts. Already we hear that wireless pictures and wireless movies will be added to the wireless telephone.

But even though long-distance photography is slow to enter into broad- casting, it will be a great thing for illustrated journalism. News comes now by wire and the pictures follow by slow freight, arriving usually a week or so after people have lost interest in the event. This delay places too much of a strain on the editor's conscience. He is sometimes unable to resist the temptation to put a stock cut to a new use or to touch up a photograph.

When Father Gapon led his procession to their death in St. Petersburg on Bloody Sunday in the first Russian revolution the American papers came out with half a dozen different portraits of him, all typical Russian revolutionists; any one of them might have looked like him, but un-

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