MAKING MONEY OUT OF MOLDS

"Mold's doing very nicely this time, Dr. Herrick," says the serious, lean-faced young man. "Good thick growth; we'll get a very decent yield out of it."

"Fine, Dr. May, fine!" smiles his chief, peeping over the rims of a rack of wide, flat trays, "Don't think you've ever had better mold than this."

This colloquy is not between a pair of lunatics taking a mischievous delight in setting things out to spoil. It might take place any day in the cluttered interior of a business-like, chemical-factory-looking sort of building on the U.S. Department of Agriculture experimental farm at Arlington, Va., just across the Potomac from Washington. The speakers are Dr. Orville E. May and Dr. Horace T. Herrick, chemists of the Color and Farm Waste Laboratory, who have found a new way by which money can be made from molds, and are passing their secrets along for the benefit of industrial chemists and the public generally.

NEW EINSTEIN THEORY QUESTIONED

Doubt as to whether the new Einstein theory, welding electromagnetism and gravitation into one law, should be substituted for existing theories attempting the same unification, is expressed by Prof. A.S. Eddington, the Cambridge astronomer-physicist, in a communication to the leading British scientific magazine, Nature.

Questioning of the "unified field theory" of Einstein by Prof. Eddington is particularly significant because the British astronomer introduced the Einstein general theory of relativity to the world when he reported the confirmation afforded Einstein's predictions by the two British solar eclipse expeditions in 1919.

The analysis of the new Einstein theory by professor Eddington is one of the first critical considerations given the new paper, which was published only a few weeks ago.

"For the present, at any rate, a nonmathematical explanation is out of the question," Professor Eddington writes in analyzing the Einstein paper, "and in any case would miss the main purpose of the theory, which is to weld a number of laws into a mathematical expression of formal simplicity. We are chiefly interested in how it compares, both as to methods and results, with the existing field-theories which have had some measure of success."

NEW IDEAS ON PERSONALITY

The keynote of the present tendency in psychiatry and psychology is the appearance of the idea that personality is not just the physical constitution and psychological and mental traits, but the integration of all of them, declared Dr. Karl A. Menninger, director of the Menninger Clinic of Topeka, Kans., at the opening session of the American Orthopsychiatric Association's sixth annual meeting in New York.

Psychiatrists must break out of the vicious circle, known to medical men, into which they are now falling, advised Dr. James S. Plant of the Essex County Juvenile Clinic of Newark, N.J. He said that psychiatrists and social workers, seeking a cause for the child's behavior problems, were going back in a procession to an earlier and earlier period in the child's life, to the prenatal period, to the parents, and finally to the parent's childhood. There was no telling where this might lead, he said. The surgeon, confronted by the vicious circle in medicine, does not seek the original cause but tries to cut out the immediate cause of trouble. Psychiatrists should try more to relieve actual conditions without looking too far for their ultimate cause, he advised.

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