A GREAT POPULARIZER OF SCIENCE . . .

DR. EDWIN E. SLOSSON, Director of Science Service, died October 15, 1929, at 6:55 p.m.

As a great popularizer of science millions of readers knew Dr. Edwin E. Slosson. He was the man who made chemistry famous for the general public. As leader and inspirer of science’s effort to hand on to the general non-technical reader the fruit of scientific research and knowledge, Dr. Slosson, director of Science Service, inaugurated a new relationship between the man in the laboratory and the man in the street.

Not quite a decade ago when far-seeing scientists and a great newspaperman, the late E.W. Scripps, joined in founding Science Service, the institution for the popularization of science, Dr. Slosson was chosen its editor. Already his book Creative Chemistry was selling like a novel. It gave the ordinary person the romance and facts of this great science that had played an important part in the war. Dr. Slosson’s great energy and ability were thrown into his new task of relating to newspaper readers the facts and implications of all science in such a way that all might understand. And Science Service grew until now millions read its dispatches and articles in newspapers, magazines, and books.

ANCIENT ARCTIC VILLAGE EXCAVATED

New evidence of man’s prehistoric life in the Arctic has been dug out of the frozen ruins of a very large Eskimo settlement on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea by Henry B. Collins, Jr., archæologist of the Smithsonian Institution, and G. Herman Brandt of Cleveland.

St. Lawrence Island and the Diomede Islands in Bering Strait may be called the metropolises of the prehistoric Arctic, said Mr. Collins, who recently returned from his Alaskan expedition. At these two points the people who lived in the north many centuries ago were especially interested in making their everyday possessions and ceremonial objects beautiful with fine carving. Here, too, ceremonials, the foundation of the social life, flourished most, judging by the quantities of carved ivory objects found.

RADIUM FOR MME. CURIE

For the past few weeks America has been hostess to the greatest woman scientist the world has ever known. Mme. Marie Curie, co-discoverer of radium, came here to accept a second gift of a gram of the precious substance from her friends and admirers in this country.

When the first gram was presented to her, in 1921, she turned it over to the Curie Institute of the University of Paris. The second gram will be given to the Warsaw Cancer Hospital, which since 1921 has rented a gram, Mme. Curie herself paying the rental with the income of a money gift she received with the first gram of radium. Warsaw is Mme. Curie’s native city, although she has worked and lived most of her life in Paris.