AMERICAN AUTOGIRO

America's first autogiro, that strange-looking craft that the Spaniard, de la Cierva, has invented, paid a courtesy call to Langley Field, VA., when the Fourth Annual Aircraft Engineering Research Conference of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was held there on May 14.

In the cover photograph (at the left) Orville Wright, the first man to fly, is talking to H.F. Pitcairn, American airplane manufacturer and pilot of the first of this new breed of aircraft to fly in America. Incidentally, in flying from Philadelphia to Langley Field via Washington, a distance record for the autogiro was set.

STORING OF MEMORIES IMPORTANT

A new science—memory dietetics—would be far from an absurd proposal, according to Dr. John M. Fletcher, director of psychological study at the behavior clinic recently opened at Tulane University.

Memories that a child stores in his mind and that leave him in a state of mental and emotional indigestion are one of the most serious problems that the clinic has to deal with.

"Here comes into the clinic a child who is showing conduct disorders of various sorts, selfishness, stealing, truancy," said Dr. Fletcher. "Here is another with an obsession that is undermining his health and leading toward mental disease. Another has a chronic speech defect that points to a hampered career of suffering. Behind them all there is likely to be found an assimilation of pathogenic memories.

"The child can no more get rid of an experience by forgetting it than he can get rid of something unwholesome by swallowing it. Memories, like food, are absorbed or assimilated. Some food cannot be satisfactorily digested. Likewise, we cannot adjust ourselves to some memories.

"That memories may relate to the cause and nature of disease is a discovery of modern psychopathology, which may be found equally as important as the germ theory of physical disease. The child guidance clinics are an outgrowth and a practical application of this discovery, in that they assume a definite causation for a child's maladjustment to his surroundings, and they attempt to trace the conditions to these specific causes with a view to ultimate relief."

TREES MAY CLOSE CALENDAR'S MISSING LINK

The missing link in the history of ancient America may soon be found.

Studies now under way in the southwest may soon make it possible to tell the exact year in which the early dwellers in these regions, who built such structures as Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico, America's oldest apartment house, did their building. In fact, this calendar will be more accurate than our present knowledge of dates in ancient Egypt.

It is from a study of trees and beams that these structures are dated.

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