PIONEER PHYSIOLOGIST COMMEMORATED

The fame of one American physiologist will be celebrated above all others as the members of the Thirteenth International Physiological Congress come together in Boston at the Harvard Medical School. The work of Dr. William Beaumont, U.S. Army surgeon, who was born in 1785 and died in 1853, was chosen for republication in a book to be presented to every member of the Congress.

It is the custom at each Congress to commemorate the work of one of the earliest physiologists of that country in which the Congress is meeting. And Dr. Beaumont is recognized as "the pioneer physiologist of the United States," remarkable for the scientific research which he carried on side by side with the arduous duties of a U.S. Army surgeon on the frontier.

The speech in which Sir William Osler set forth Beaumont’s claims to this rank has been reprinted and bound together with a facsimile edition of Beaumont’s great work on The Physiology of Digestion. It is this volume which is given to the incoming members.

WHAT WILL THE CENSUS ASK YOU?

How old are you? Don’t get angry with the poor man (or woman) who rings your doorbell soon after April 1, 1930, and who’ll come in and sit on a stiff chair in your parlor and ask you all kinds of personal questions.

The much-abused census-taker can’t help being inquisitive. The United States government has ordered him to ask you all about yourself and your family. Furthermore, the law reads that you must answer him correctly to the best of your ability, or be guilty of a misdemeanor against your Uncle Sam.

But you don’t need to worry. The information you give the census-taker is strictly in confidence. After it gets to Washington, you are given a number, that number is entered on a card, and the card is punched to indicate the information which you gave, and that card is used by the Census Bureau in compiling various masses of statistics, but the sheet containing your name goes into a file, to which nobody but the Census Bureau has access—not even another government bureau or department, such as the Treasury Department. Oh, some 50 years later, to be sure, the files are made available as public records, but 50 years is a long time—more than some lifetimes.

The census taker who comes to your house is just one of a field force of 100,000 doorbell ringers, who will have to hurry around and get the 1930 census in the districts assigned to them, and hurry the results in to Uncle Sam before the first of May, 1930.

It is believed, on the basis of estimates of average periodic increases in population, that the present census will list anywhere between 123,000,000 and 125,000,000 persons. There is an electric device on display at the Bureau of the Census that shows that in 1926 in the United States there was an average of

One birth every 12 seconds.
One death every 24 seconds.
One immigrant every 1 ¾ minutes.
One emigrant every 5 ¾ minutes.
Net gain, one person every 20 seconds.

Today the Census Bureau says the pace has slowed up a bit, and our net gain now is one person every 23 seconds.

EARTH YIELDS 200,000,000 AMPERES

The earth itself is a huge electric dynamo generating enough current to supply light, heat, and other electrical needs to the ten largest cities in the United States for at least 1 million years. Recent researches on thermal reactions inside Earth, conducted by Dr. Ross Gunn, civilian scientist of the Naval Research Laboratories and inventor of a short-wave oscillator and aircraft industries, indicate that Earth is the greatest known electrical wonder in the universe.

Dr. Gunn has published a theoretical treatise on his studies in the Physical Review. The intricate theoretical problem of Earth’s electrical condition showed that the currents generated inside Earth amount to more than 200,000,000 amperes. Dr. Gunn is careful to emphasize that this tremendous source of energy is unavailable for use by man. Like atomic energy, it will be kept in Nature’s storehouse for the use of the generations of perhaps a million years in the future, he says.