THE TEMPLE GUARD

The great stone Temple of the Warriors in the ruined city of Chichen Itza, in Yucatan, has been reclaimed from the jungle so far as science can accurately set the stones in place again, and it stands in clean-cut beauty against the sky. The expedition from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which spent much time and labor reconstructing the temple, is again at Chichen Itza and has sent the unusual photograph of one facade of the building, shown on our cover this week. Six grotesque masks with curling noses adorn the wall, and in the center is the carving of the Plumed Serpent, favorite deity of the city. The serpent clutches a human head in its jaws, and surrounding are the plumes in a graceful design. The carvings of the temple were originally painted in brilliant color. The native boy who stands guard before the temple of his ancestors is posed with spear and club. No doubt, temple guards were so armed in the thirteenth century, when the Warrior's Temple was one of the outstanding buildings of the city. The building was named because of the figures of eighty warriors that adorn the columns of the interior. Presumably, the figures are portraits of real statesmen and heroes of prehistoric America.

"SUPER-UNIVERSES" LOCATED

From electron up through the atoms they constitute, the various elements made up of atoms, the stars made of these elements, the star clusters consisting of swarms of stars, the "universes," such as our own, that are formed of hordes of the clusters, up to the "super-universes," or galaxies of galaxies, made up of a number of universes, and perhaps, to even more vast clouds made of these galaxies of galaxies, or "cosmos."

Such, in brief, is the overwhelming vista opened up to the scientist by the latest work of one of America's most famous astronomers, Dr. Harlow Shapley, the director of the Harvard College Observatory at Cambridge, Mass.

10,000 BEES' TONGUES MEASURED

One of the first large-scale measurements of insects, comparable to the elaborate measurements made by anthropologists of members of the human race, has been undertaken by Dr. W.W. Alpatov of the Zoological Museum of Moscow, now working at the Institute of Biological Research under Prof. Raymond Pearl of the Johns Hopkins University. Thousands of bees from Russia and the United States were examined during the investigation, which has shed interesting light on problems of bee-keeping, according to a report in the Quarterly Review of Biology.

The anatomical feature to which Dr. Alpatov devoted the most attention in this huge survey with the microscope was the tongue, tool of honey collecting. In Russia it was found that bees' tongues increase in length as one travels south, until in the Caucasus, the southeasternmost corner of European Russia, are formed the longest-tongued bees now known to entomology. In the United States no such geographical distribution held good, a condition accounted for by the fact that all honey bees in this country are species introduced from Europe within the last two or three centuries. Furthermore, progressive bee-keeping has fostered interbreeding with bees from all parts of the country. Racial characteristics cannot be as fixed as with indigenous bees bred in the same locality for hundreds of years.

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