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A NEW AGENCY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE

IN a democracy like ours it is particularly important that the people as a whole should so far as possible understand the aims and achievements of modern science, not only because of the value of such knowledge to themselves but because research directly or indirectly depends upon popular appreciation of its methods. In fact the success of democratic government as well as the prosperity of the individual may be said to depend upon the ability of the people to distinguish between real science and fake, between the genuine expert and the pretender.

The education of children in schools and of a few in colleges is not sufficient for this. It must be carried into maturity through such channels as the newspapers and the motion pictures. Unfortunately the rapid advance and increasing complexity of modern science has made it difficult for the general reader to follow its course and he has often given up the attempt in despair. Consequently we find the reading public divided. into two classes as may be discerned in any public reading room; a minority that habitually read the scientific journals and a majority that never touch even the most popular of them.

In the effort to bridge this gap and to aid in the dissemination of scientific information, a new institution, the Science Service, has been established at Washington. It is chartered as a non-profit-making corporation and all receipts from the sale of articles, books or films will be devoted to the development of new methods of popular education in science. The governing board of fifteen trustees consists of ten scientists and five journalists.

The charter is a wide one, authorizing Science Service to publish books and maga

zines, to conduct conferences and lecture

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courses and to produce motion pictures. Its first conference was held last summer at San Diego, California, on the problems of the Pacific, and another is planned for next summer on urbanization and ruralization.

Science Service will not at present undertake to publish any periodical of its own, for it is believed that much better results can be obtained by devoting the same effort and expense to reaching a wider range of readers through newspapers and to directing attention to the various well-edited periodicals of popular science already in existence rather than attempting to rival them.

Science Service will aim to act as a sort of liaison officer between scientific circles and the outside world. It will endeavor to interpret the results of original research as they appear in the technical journals and proceedings of societies in a way to enlighten the layman. The specialist is likewise a layman in every science except his own and he, too, needs to have new things explained to him in non-technical language.

We may not all go so far as Tolstoy who said that you can explain Kant to a peasant if you understand Kant well enough. But it is evident that part of the indifference of the public to scientific questions is due to poor presentation. When we can find writers who know their subject and are willing to devote as much attention to putting it in effective form as though it were a poem or short story there will be less reason to complain of lack of interest. Science Service will spare no pains or expense in the endeavor (1) to get the best possible quality of popular science writing and (2) to get it to the largest possible number of readers. If in doing this it can make both ends meet, so much the better. If not, it will do it anyway.

Through the generosity of Mr. E. W. Scripps, of Miramar, California, the Science. Service has been assured of such financial support from the start as to insure its independence. It will not be under the control of any clique, class or commercial interest. It will not be the organ of any one association. It will serve all the sciences. It will supply any of the news syndicates. It will not indulge in

propaganda unless it be propaganda to urge the value of research and the usefulness of science.

The first board of trustees of Science Service is composed as follows: Three representatives of the National Academy of

Sciences

Dr. A. A. Noyes, director, chemical research, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.

Dr. R. A. Milikan, professor of physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Dr. John C. Merriam, president, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, D. C. Three representatives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Dr. D. T. MacDougal, director, Desert Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Tucson, Arizona.

Dr. J. McKeen Cattell, editor, SCIENCE and Scientific Monthly, Garrison-on-Hudson, New York,

Dr. George I. Moore, director, Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis, Missouri. Three representatives of The National Research

Council

Dr. Vernon Kellogg, permanent secretary, National Research Council, Washington, D. C. Dr. George E. Hale, director, Mount Wilson Observatory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pasadena, California.

Dr. R. M. Yerkes, chairman, Research Information Service, National Research Council, Washington, D. C.

Representatives of the Scripps Estate

Mr. E. W. Scripps, Miramar, California.
Mr. R. P. Scripps, Cleveland, Ohio.

Dr. W. E. Ritter, director, Scripps Institution for Biological Research of the University of California, La Jolla, California.

Representatives of the Journalistic Profession Edwin F. Gay, president, New York Evening Post Company, New York City.

Chester H. Rowell, former editor, The Fresno Republican, Berkeley, California.

William Allen White, editor, The Emporia Gazette, Emporia, Kansas.

Dr. W. E. Ritter is president of the board, Mr. R. P. Scripps, treasurer, and Dr. Vernon Kellogg, vice-president and chairman of the executive committee. This committee is composed of five members, one selected from each group of trustees from the different organi

zations represented on the board. The present members of the committee are the president and vice-president of the board, Dr. J. McKeen Cattell and Dr. J. C. Merriam. A member from the journalistic group is yet to be selected.

The headquarters of Science Service have been provisionally established in the building of the National Research Council, at 1701 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D. C.

As editor the board of trustees has selected Edwin E. Slosson, Ph.D., who for twelve years was professor of chemistry in the University of Wyoming and for seventeen years literary editor of The Independent, New York. He has been associate in the Columbia School of Journalism since its foundation and is the author of "Creative Chemistry," "Easy Lessons in Einstein," "Great American Universities," "Major Prophets of To-day," lives of Rumford and Gibbs and other scientific and literary publications.

As manager of the new enterprise the board has selected Howard Wheeler, formerly editor of the San Francisco Daily News, Pacific coast manager of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, managing editor of Harpers Weekly, and for five years editor of Everybody's Magazine, war war correspondent and author of "Are We Ready?"

The editor of Science Service desires to receive advance information of important researches approaching the point of publicity in order to arrange for their proper presentation in the press. He also wishes to secure correspondents in every university and center of research who have the time, disposition and ability to write for non-technical journals. He particularly wants to get in touch with young men and women in the various sciences who have literary inclinations and would be willing to submit to a rigorous course of training with a view to making the writing of popular science a part of their life work.

The manager wants to learn from newspapers and periodicals what sort of scientific news they need. If editors will notify Science Service by mail or telegraph whenever they want an article on any scientific subject,

an effort will be made to find the best authority to write it. EDWIN E. SLOSSON

THE DISTRIBUTION OF HOOKWORMS IN THE ZOOLOGICAL REGIONS INCIDENTAL to the pursuit of some publichealth problems in the Orient I observe what seems to me to be a peculiar zoological and geographical distribution of two species of hookworms which parasitize man, Ancylostoma duodenale and Necator americanus and I feel confident that a study of the distribution of these obligate parasites of man will throw some light on problems dealing with the migrations of races of mankind in the past as well as other problems in ethnology.

It

Ancylostoma duodenale and Necator americanus parasitize man with equal facility. is as easy for a white man, Chinese, Polynesian, East Indian, Malay or Negro to become infected with A. duodenale as with N. americanus and they may become infected with either or both species of worm, but it was rather remarkable to find that just as the races of man were primarily distributed in Urasia, Africa and Oceania so there seems to have been a primary and distinctive distribution of A. duodenale and N. americanus for I found that Japanese, East Indians and Chinese from north of say twenty-three degrees north latitude, that is men of the Holarctic region, harbored a very marked predominance of A. duodenale. On the other hand southern East Indians, i.e., Tamils and Malabaris say from south of twenty degrees north latitude as well as Malays from Sumatra, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and Java, that is to say, men of the Oriental region, harbored a marked predominance of or were exclusively parasitized by N. ameri

canus.

In studying the hookworm content of an uncontaminated group of Fijians, a mixed Polynesian and Melanesian stock, I found A. duodenale to be entirely absent. N. americanus and a few A. ceylanicum, picked up from dogs, represented the worms harbored.

In South Africa among Kaffirs from south of twenty-two degrees south latitude and among some tropical natives, that is to say

men from the Ethiopian region, Necator was the only hookworm encountered. The search was not an exhaustive one. Leiper and others, however, have recorded only Necator from this region.

I have not worked in Europe or northern Africa but Looss, Boycott and others report the exclusive presence of A. duodenale in England, western Europe, Italy and Egypt, that is to say in the European moiety of the Holarctic region.

The introduction of the negro, East Indian and Mediterranean peoples into America has obscured the picture here and research among isolated and uncontaminated Indian tribes has yet to be undertaken. This research will no doubt yield some interesting data, helpful possibly in tracing the origin of the Amerind populations; it may be possible to trace a relationship for them with Mongoloids from Holarctic or from Oriental regions.

While there is a sharply marked out regional distribution of the worms in certain areas, in others time has brought about some overlapping of the two species.

The absence of Necator from Europe indicates pretty positively that European soil has not been contaminated by a Negroid race from the Ethiopian region, that is Africa south of the Sahara desert. The absence of A. duodenale from secluded groups of mountain people in the Oriental and in Ethiopian regions is explained in a similar way. In mid-Java and in a few coast and river towns in Fiji, East Indians have brought in large numbers of A. duodenale within historic times.

The movements of negroes, Oriental and Mediterranean peoples are modifying the primitive worm-species-formula of non-migratory people, hence interpretations must be made from carefully selected surveys only.

It is held by some that man and his obligate parasites living in symbiosis have come along through the ages together, that the relationship has not been recently or casually acquired. If this be true we should expect to find man parasitized always by the two obligate forms and not to find man of the Holarctic regions parasitized exclusively or

almost exclusively by A. duodenale, while man of the Oriental and Ethiopian regions parasitized exclusively or almost exclusively by Necator americanus. This finding in any case suggests the possibility of the distribution of the two species of worms in distinctly different zoologic as well as geographic regions being due to there having been two primitive races of man, each one originally parasitized by a particular species of worm. Certain it is that N. americanus is found more exclusively among black- and brown-skinned races, while A. duodenale is found exclusively or greatly predominates at the present time among Caucasian and Mongoloid stocks.

It may be that a Eurasiatic race of man, possibly the Pithecanthropus of Trinil, Java, became split off and furnished the stock from which man of Oriental and Ethiopian regions sprung. Proliopithecus emerging from Holarctic Africa may have been not only the parent form of man, gibbon, chimpanzee, gorilla and the orang-outang, but he may have harbored the parent form from which have arisen the different hookworm species found in the various species of anthropoids of today. Possibly the ancestral tree of the primates can be revised after a study of the host relationships of their respective obligate nematode parasites. At any rate we can say that it seems likely from the present distribution of A. duodenale and N. americanus as

determined in surveys recently made of selected groups that there were originally races of man parasitized exclusively by A. duodenale and inhabiting the Holarctic region, that is Europe, Asia, north of the Oriental region and northern Africa; and that there were other races of man parasitized exclusively by N. americanus and inhabiting the Oriental region, that is the southern peninsulas of Asia and Indonesia or the Malay Archipelago; and also the Ethiopian region, that is, Africa south of the Sahara Desert.

The subject is an enticing one to pursue but further deductions should probably not be hazarded at this time by one who is merely a peregrinating parasitologist.

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SAMUEL T. DARLING INTERNATIONAL HEALTH BOARD

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The workers who have contributed our various large area maps doubtless realize better than any one else the impressionistic nature of their final product. In most cases these men have done the utmost possible with scanty and vague local data. There have been, however, a few instances of buoyant disregard of the deadly principle of accumulation of error which ought not to have happened. One author, mapping a fairly large area, secured local data from a source whose authority few would care to question and then from his distant vantage point cut and trimmed until, speaking mildly, the accuracy of a considerable sector of his map was seriously impaired.

In preparing careful local maps of vegetation the question of procedure varies greatly, and is seldom an easy one. The two sources of help outlined below have been put to rather

pretty generally relied upon. Happily, too, there have been few serious errors in running lines certainly nothing like the gross blunders of some of the surveyors of a later day who worked in states farther west. When one considers the genuine hardships and dangers unconsciously revealed by the field notes covering the Connecticut Western Reserve (done before 1800), for example, the excellence of the work is remarkable.

A means of utilizing these notes has been worked out after some experiment, and combines economy of time with accuracy. A set of arbitrary generic symbols was devised which could be logically grouped and readily memorized. Three typical series of symbols are shown in the accompanying table. They consist of familiar units of penmanship and can be written without much effort, while their number can be increased to cover almost

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