Months Of Travel Research Articles

THE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE SCIENTISTS FOR CHILD CARE

My contribution to your discussion lies in a field to which I have devoted myself as a result of my journey through chaos during the social upheavals that resulted from total war. Since those months of travel and observation, I have been advocating the improvement of our administrative machinery on a federal, state, and local level with one object in view-to mobilize our resources, both scientific and material, in order that life may become more liveable and the American family more stable through the length and breadth of our country. I shall never forget the feelings of frustration and despair which took hold of me day after day as I walked out of efficient factories into the inefficiency of the surrounding environment. Within the factories all was order and economy of effort, resulting in a maximum production of material objects. In the social surroundings all was disorder and frustration, that resulted in a waste of human energy, health and happiness, destructive not only to the individuals involved but to their children and their children's children. Do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing that we should achieve a machine-like efficiency in our social structure. What makes our factories effective is our genius for translating knowledge into action for material ends. Upon that objective we have spent our highest abilities ever since the beginning of the technological revolution. What we have forgotten in our competitive struggle for wealth and power, is the moral responsibility to translate knowledge into action for purely human ends. We have forgotten that man himself is the supreme value and the measure of all other values. Why did we forget this fundamental truth? Because the race for wealth caused America's most prevalent type of disease on which nobody is doing enough researchheart failure due to the steady hardening of our emotional arteries. The scientists, as the people who had the most knowledge on the conservation of our human resources, must, it seems to me, accept a commensurate share of the blame. Many of them toiled in their ivory towers intent upon more and more knowledge regardless of its social and politi-

Social Regression in the Orinoco and Amazon Basins: Notes on a Journey in 1931 and 1932

D URING eight months of travel in the Orinoco and Amazon basins in I93I and 1932 on behalf of the Carnegie Institution of Washington1 the writer had an opportunity of observing the radical series of social changes in progress in certain areas. They represent an acceleration by the current world-wide depression of a process already in operation, the decline consequent to the rubber competition of the Far East.2 The changes may be summed up in the statement that the white man as a whole is withdrawing from the jungle rivers, that a small remnant is making frantic though groping efforts at some kind of adjustment to maintain a foothold, and that the Indians are coming into their own again-are being freed from the white man's domination according to one point of view, or being forced back into savagery according to another.

Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet

The account of the authors 18 months of travel in the years 1906-1908. The book is in 3 volumes and gives a lively account of the authors travels and adventures in Tibet. The author skips the heavy technical jargon and has adopted an easy style of writing that would be appealing to the expert as well as an interested reader. The book is full of photographs and wonderful sketches made by the author on his travels. Amusing anecdotes and stories fill the pages as do the descriptions of the topography, people, religion, flora and fauna, customs and manners. A short glimpse of the name of a few chapters would explain the nature of this work. Road to Lahsa, to the edge of the Tibetan plateau, in unknown country, in the land of the wild yak, the new year festival, the Tashi Lama etc. This book is a reprint of the 1909 edition. With 544 illustrations from photographs , water color sketches and drawings by the author and 12 maps.

THE ORIGIN OF THE “BOOK OF MORMON”

The Palmyra upon the title-page of the original Book of Mormon (plate xxx), of which an edition of five hundred copies was printed, was not that great and ancient city of Syria, the elder sister of Damascus, Tadmor in the Wilderness, but, at the time of the publication of the work, in 183o, a small village in western New York, in the midst of the Indian country of the Six Nations, then recently opened to white settlement by people from the eastern states, and from the nearer settlements in the eastern part of the state of New York itself. It was one of the new stations on the popular trail to the famous garden spot of the west, the wonderful Genesee country, the western Eldorado of that day and. time. Only thirty years had elapsed since the beginning of the century. The wonder tales of productive soil and amazing crops had stirred all New England. The sterile acres and scanty crops of that land of the Pilgrim and the Puritan did not attract their descendants to abide at home and starve, when a few weeks or months of travel would give them possession of such fertile valleys and sun-kissed slopes as report located in the wilds of the beautiful Genesee country. The old Surveyor General of the state of New York, who, happening to carry in his camp-outfit a copy of Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, bestowed out of it upon his daily work the names of all the old-world worthies, heroes, cities, towns, and countries,-Rome, Utica, Syracuse, Pompey, Homer, Manlius, Camillus, Tully, Cicero, Athens, Sparta, Troy, Ilion,-little knew when he left the name Palmyra upon the cross-roads on the Genesee trail that he was giving name to the locality 675

Four Months of Travel in British Guiana

Four Months of Travel in British Guiana