THAT André Manrois should have devoted his biographical tact and acumen to English subjects is the good fortune of English readers. The biographer of Shelley and Disraeli is well qualified to advise a young compatriot setting out for AngloSaxon territory. His essay is entitled in French: Conseils àa un jeune Français partant pour l’Angleterre.Russell Bookhout gives us this picture of himself : —

I am a working stiff, with a wandering foot and a U education, principally because I must earn money to live on and prefer to do it in as many different ways as possible and in as many different localities as I can reach. I came by the wandering hoof naturally, since my father’s folks have been backwoodsmen, farmers, and drifters like myself for the last two hundred years or so. I tacked on university schooling to the rest because I found it necessary, and have just finished that part at the University of Wisconsin.

The first happening of importance in which I took part was on September 19, 1898, at a farm nine miles south of Madison, Wisconsin. The second was fracturing my leg six years later, with resulting complications which meant that until I was sixteen years old I spent most of my time reading, watching the wild things grow, and the stars swing past. I was nineteen when the war ended, — the Kaiser heard I was in the last draft and gave up the struggle, — and, having nothing better to do, started wanderings which increased until I had seen much of the United States and something of the Orient.

In his work as an editor, Edward Weeks has become thoroughly acquainted with both book and magazine publishing. Captain William Outerson has been a sailor, janitor, reporter, prospector for gold in Alaska, and has served in the Black Watch and later in India. He is a graduate of Marietta College.

S. Foster Damon is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of William Blake — His Philosophy and Symbols, and of Astrolabe, a volume of poems. ▵ After distinguishing herself in several fields of study, H. D, Hill received a Ph.D. degree in economics. She has been especially interested in workers’ education. Sir John Campbell writes us as follows: —

I have now retired from the Indian Civil Service, and resigned also my appointment in Greece — where I was vice chairman of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission, i spent twenty years in India, and about seven in Simla as undersecretary to the Government of India. My last district was on the frontier — adjoining Nepal, which I visited two or three times when tiger shooting. Since leaving India, I have spent three years at the India Office, Whitehall.

Arthur E. Morgan is President of Antioch College. Ethel M. Arnold, a niece of Matthew Arnold and sister of the late Mrs. Humphry Ward, recalls the bestloved clergyman who ever hated dogs and hunted snarks. Reinhold Niebuhr has recently given up his pastorate in Detroit to accept a chair in the Union Theological Seminary. Eileen Shanahan has left Dublin to work in the stenographic branch of the International Labor Office of the League of Nations at Geneva.

F. Lyman Windolph is a lawyer of long standing in the Pennsylvania town fortunate enough to possess a street of such honorable lineage. Elizabeth Coatsworth is at present in Guatemala. George Miksch Sutton is State Ornithologist of Pennsylvania. He writes us: —

On March 27 I fell fifty feet from a cliff where I was examining a raven’s nest. I broke five ribs and suffered other injuries. . . .

The turkey vulture is about two and onehalf feet long. It has a considerable wing spread (about six feet), but when folded the wings do not occupy much space. The turkey vulture makes no nest. It merely lays its eggs on the ground in a cave, in a crevice among rocks, or, as in the present instance, in a fallen, hollow log. At Pymatuning Swamp, Pennsylvania, where there are no caves, the vultures nest exclusively in hollow logs, so far as I have been able to determine.

The turkey vulture’s only method of defense when cornered, so far as I know, is vomiting. Its bill is hooked, to be sure, but its feet are those of a walking bird rather than of a bird of prey, and birds of prey usually depend upon their sharply clawed feet in giving battle.

As I shoved myself along, I pushed the young bird and egg ahead of me. The adult bird naturally retreated after I had struck her with my hand. An eagle, a hawk, or an owl might not have been repelled so easily, but the turkey vulture is cowardly. After reaching the end of the log, I grasped the bird by her feet, pushed the stone outward, laid the egg and young outside the log, and then wormed my way out and tied the mother vulture’s feet together and to a sapling, with a shred of torn clothing.

Howard Douglas Dozier has been successively Head of the School of Commerce at the University of Georgia and Professor of Economics at Dartmouth. He now acts as adviser to one of the government departments at Washington. Robert Sencourt is a student of European affairs who has devoted particular attention to the problems of the Vatican. Nora Wain has contributed frequently to the Atlantic from her rich store of Chinese experiences. Readers will be interested in the following paragraphs from one of her letters: —

Before my marriage I made a trip to China and stayed with one family in their homestead, where sixty-nine persons dwell in the high gray wallencireled courts. They taught me my first China tongue, and chaperoned me as though I were a daughter. They always write ahead to my new place of residence preparing the way against loneliness, as carefully as though I were born one of them, by letters to relatives by marriage or relatives of relatives. When they come to stay in my courtyard they investigate my home economies and regulate my ’helpers.’ They remember me at the festivals when a daughter should be remembered, and expect from me the annual roast duck, the half of which is always returned, that is the courtesy custom of a ‘daughter who has gone to complete another household.’

I love this family. The aged mother has taken the place of the mother I never knew. It is because of them that I have had no fear during the civil strife through which we have lived. A sense of the eternal rhythm of history learned within their courtyard walls has kept alight in me a lantern of trust in China’s future.

For those who may have missed an installment of Mazo de la Roche’s sequel to Jalna, we print a brief synopsis: —

Alayne Archer, a manuscript reader in a New York publishing house, marries Eden Whiteoak, a young poet, and goes with him to live at Jalna, his family’s Canadian estate. Within a year Eden disappears, as the result of a brief affair with Pheasant, the wife of his brother Piers. Alayne returns to New York, but not before a strong attraction has sprung up between her and Renny, Eden’s oldest brother, the virtual head of the Whiteoak family.

Eighteen-year-old Finch Whiteoak, struggling to pass his examinations for college and at the same time to follow his strong musical and artistic leanings, quarrels with his brothers and runs away to New York, where Alayne befriends him. There he accidentally discovers Eden, seriously ill. Renny goes to New York to bring both his brothers back to Jalna, and Eden succeeds in persuading Alayne to return with them to nurse him through his sickness.

Mortality and immortality in trees.

TUCSON, ARIZONA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I cannot let the April number of the Atlantic Monthly pass into the files without a word of appreciation of the article by Mr. Stewart on ‘Trees as an Invention.’ This is charmingly done and is a vivid illustration of the fact that good writing is not incompatible with facts. His statements are well in accord with the soundest conceptions of the activities of trees.
The appearance of this article was coincidental with that of Publication 397 of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in which Professor J. B. Overton, of Wisconsin, and Professor Gilbert Smith, of Stanford, join me in setting out the results of several years’ work onl the hydrostatics of trees. We have made some contributions to the subject, including a finding to the effect that sap does move in old layers of such trees as the willow and walnut, and that living cells of great age may be found in very old layers, as much as four centuries. These are new findings which do not make Mr. Stewart’s article any less meritorious.
D. T. MACDOUGAL

Mr. F. Lyman Windolph, who contributes ‘King Street’ to our present number, recently received a letter from a Pennsylvania judge which shows that the memory of his former Atlantic papers is still green. DEAR MR. WINDQLPH: —
I suppose I am about the poorest correspondent in these United States and its dependencies. ’Hie older I get, the less I am inclined to do today what can just as well be put off until to-morrow. And it is not altogether bad philosophy. It has saved me many a delightful round of golf, and no doubt many a needless act and blunder.
I don’t know which I like the better — ' Defending a Bad Cause,’ in the Atlantic of April 1927, or ‘The Country Lawyer,’ in April 1928; both were so good. The latter carried a most interesting personal appeal. When I came to the bar in the early ’80s we were a rural county with agriculture the dominant industry. In a way, we are still rural, but the mining of bituminous coal and the manufacture of coke now dominate all other interests. The character of our population and the practice of law have in the meantime almost entirely changed. As I read ‘The Country Lawyer’ I lived over again my earlier years at the bar and many of their activities — the settlement of estates, the appraisement of the personal property, its sale, partition proceedings, the services of the old-time land surveyor, a type now nearly extinct, but such an important factor in ejectment cases, then common, now rare.
In the January Atlantic, in Archer B. Gilfillan’s ‘The Herding Day,’ on page 20, there is an allusion to the relative speed of the dog and rabbit, which called to mind the first public sale I ever attended, that in the estate of a greatuncle held in 1864, and the first debate to which I ever listened, the argument being between some young men of the neighborhood gathered round the big fireplace in the great stone kitchen of the homestead built by one of my greatgrandfathers. The question was which could run faster, a dog or a rabbit. That was some discussion. Finally a big, tall, red-faced young fellow, with positive ideas about law enforcement, made a somewhat dogmatic deliverance to this effect: ‘Now listen here — it’s jist this-away. If the ground is as-scendin’ a leetle uphill, the rabbit’ll git away; but if the ground is dee-scendin’ a leetle downhill, the dog’ll git the rabbit.’ That closed the controversy. I was glad to find that Gilfillan corroborated the friend of my youth.
In my first years at the bar one of my best and most valued friends was an old-time surveyor. He taught me more about land law and titles than I ever learned out of the books. Another of my surveyor friends was something of a shark on geology, and a favorite device of opposing counsel was to involve him in an argument about the strata and structure of the land in dispute. He was strong on what he called ‘conglomerate.’ Humanity seems to be made up of much the same material.
E. H. REPPERT

Earnest Elmo Calkins’s ‘Virgin Territory for Motor Cars,’ which appeared in the March Atlantic, has stimulated heartfelt reflections.

DEAR ATLANTIC, &emdash
Earnest Elmo Calkins is indeed, as you say, ‘ a connoisseur of highways.’ All his recommendations are excellent and his views seem peculiarly sound, but —
Is n’t there something worthy of comment in the fact that in his lengthy travels by car he has apparently observed no advertising signs to criticize save those associated with hot-dog stands on the summit of the Mohawk Trail? There’s an old saying which is applicable to almost every situation which we meet in this life: ‘It makes a lot of difference whose ox is gored.’ Just because we are all human beings we ought not to be too hard on Mr. Calkins for failing to observe the deep wounds in the highway ox which have been inflicted by the useful profession which Mr. Calkins adorns.
My only suggestion is that the Atlantic Monthly arrange to have Mr. Calkins take his car out to the Hawaiian Islands and travel for a while over highways decorated by neither hotdog stands, theatrical posters, chewing-gum ads, nor replicas of contented cows. Out in the Islands they know how to protect the beautiful scenery that is their inheritance. I am sure that Mr. Calkins, once he had looked upon a signboardless landscape, woidd become a little more specific in his recommendations for beautifying our roads and protecting that beauty by law.
H. T. P.

Paving and good intentions.

HARTFORD, CONN.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Mr. Calkins’s very interesting article on highways in the March Atlantic contains much food for thought for motorists and business men in general throughout the country.
With much of his proposed programme, particularly that relating to the mapping and marking of highways, nearly everyone will agree, but with one feature of his programme I, for one, most heartily disagree — namely, the paving of all existing roads.
If all of our roads are to be paved, where is anyone going to live? No one wants to live on a paved road any more than he wants to live next to a railroad track.
There are still a few prehistoric people who enjoy walking and horseback riding and they should not be deprived of their source of recreation. There are also some motorists who prefer jogging along at fifteen miles an hour over a country road and stopping to look at a view or picking wild grapes to bowling over a hard road at fifty miles an hour.
I believe the money which we are going to spend on our highways in the future should be spent on widening and straightening the existing trunk lines. If this could be done thousands of lives would be saved annually, and the pleasure of motoring increased enormously.
Yours very truly,
HAROLD G. HOLCOMBE

From the vice president of a famous map-making firm.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Every motorist will agree that Mr. Calkins’s argument for more hard roads in the United States is timely. His comparison of the roads of the United States and France, however, is unjust in its intimation that this country is backward in the matter of public improvements. His criticism of American road maps is obviously based on cursory knowledge, or no knowledge at all, of the requirements and desires of the American motorist in his hundreds of thousands.
The truth is, the American motorist does not want the highly detailed road maps proposed by Mr. Calkins. If he did, map makers would make them.
The maps Mr. Calkins points to with pride as examples of what American road maps should be are the Cartes Michelin.
Cartes Michelin are road maps of France, prepared as advertisements, and sold in France at a few cents each by the makers of Michelin tires. They are on a scale of about three miles to the inch (3.15, to be exact) and printed in five colors on sheets 331 x 19 1/2 inches, each sheet representing an area about 104 x 60 miles. They show all roads, both main traveled roads and byroads, and indicate their widths and pavement. They show everything that is worth stopping to see — every peak, gorge, grotto, church, calvary, chateau, ruin, barrow, cromlech, cascade, golf links, polo field, race track, cemetery, customhouse, and ferry. They are, as Mr. Calkins says, ’as full of detail as one of Hogarth’s crowded prints.’
Admit, for argument’s sake, that it were possible to produce road maps of the entire United States closely resembling Cartes Michelin, and to offer them for sale at fifty cents each. Allowing for slight overlapping of maps of adjoining districts, it would require some five hundred different maps to cover the more than 3,026,000 square miles of this country, Americans take their motoring in large doses; two to four hundred miles a day is a moderate run. Five hundred to three thousand miles is a little vacation jaunt. A person motoring from Chicago to the coast, following the Lincoln Highway west, and National Old Trails Highway east, would cover something like 4500 miles of road. Fortyfive maps, the size and scale of Cartes Michelin, would be necessary to cover the route. And, traveling at fair tourist speed of two hundred miles a day, who has time to look for byways and points of interest?
As Mr. Calkins points out, but one mile of road in five is paved; the other four are not to be recommended as safe or pleasant for motoring. Then why put them on the map? Most American road maps show all paved roads; as soon as more roads are paved, maps will show them. American motorists do not need and do not want large-scale, detailed road maps. The aim of most map makers is to produce accurate maps fitted for their intended use. The tendency in recent years has been away from detail, and toward simplicity and clearness. To show the best roads in such a way that a motorist can easily and quickly take himself from one point to another is the purpose of road maps.
‘No map maker in our country has yet grasped the vital fact that, in order to be sure of the right road, all the wrong roads must be shown,’ says Mr. Calkins. But for a motorist w*ho can read the road markings on his map, and find the same markings every mile or so along the road, with crossroads and branches clearly marked, we wonder! The experience of years of map making indicates that all the average motorist wants is a map showing what routes wall lead to his destination.
Suppose, also for the sake of argument, that tourists did want maps like those of Michelin. Their price would be prohibitive. Basic data for such maps is not available for any considerable part of the country. Government geologic survey maps, recommended by Mr. Calkins, cover about one third of the United States. Illinois is not completely surveyed as yet, after more than fifty years of constant toil on the part of the government. The majority of survey sheets available are woefully out of date for such purposes. Private enterprise could, of course, make its own surveys, but the cost, is beyond the resources of all map makers combined.
France has been building roads for a thousand years. Our modern road building began not more than twenty years ago. Cartes Michelin are based on the military maps of France, which show an amazing amount of detail. France is smaller than Texas; its population one third that of the United States. Every stone in France is included in one or more surveys. And, figuratively, no stone is moved from one year’s end to the other. Very probably, more new roads are built in one state in one year than in all of France in ten years,
A Carte Miehclin of 1920 (except for the destruction and consequent rebuilding as a result of the war) is essentially accurate and up to date in 1929. An American road map of 1928 is out of date in 1929. To make a map is but the beginning; to keep it up to date is the real task. Some American map makers completely revise and correct their drawings and make new plates every year. The maps are generally in two or three colors. Fifty maps cover the country. Fifty maps, two colors each, mean 100 plates made new each year. Cartes Miehclin applied to this country would mean 500 maps; five colors each — 2500 new plates, as compared with 100. Not that a map maker makes only 100 plates a year; the total is closer to 2500. But adoption of the Cartes Michclin style of maps would increase the cost of maps in the ratio of 100 to 2500. Added detail means added corrections. Corrections are costly. The market for road maps will yield only about so much money, it cannot be increased anywhere near twenty-five times. As for maps given away as advertisements — such maps have a definite value as advertisements. Increasing their cost twenty-five times would not. increase their value as advertising mediums proportionately.
Some years back, Michelin published three maps, in the French style, of the territory around New York. Their existence was short; they were never reprinted.
Doubtless when the United States has all been surveyed, when road conditions become stabilized, and when (not before) the country reaches the same density of population as France and Americans take to leisurely, sight-seeing motoring habits, sufficient demand for highly detailed road maps will exist to warrant their manufacture.
FRED L. MCNALLY

The pattens Lucy wore.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
In the Contributors’ Club of the April issue someone writes of Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray. In my young days I read of her; my grandma, who put the book in my hands, was her contemporary. But Lucy never wore rubbers — she never knew of them. If in her village the rain fell and the ways were muddy she probably had pattens — a patten being a board with straps and buckles to hold it to the shod foot, as a skate is worn, and resting on an iron ring attached to the underside of the board. Wearing pattens, she could walk through rain-filled lanes without soiling her shoes. My grandma wore pattens in England, and in 1840 brought them here with other household goods, but found no use for them on Philadelphia brick sidewalks, and the pattens went to the junk pile.
My wife, who was a schoolgirl in England just before the Crimean War, had pattens, but disliked them — considered them vulgar. Coming to America, she left them behind with other childish things, and, when atmospheric conditions made it necessary, wore rubbers; pattens were things of the past. She adopted local customs. JOHN E. NORCROSS

‘Art and Authenticity’ are as inseparable as ‘Pride and Prejudice.’

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
In an interesting article appearing in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Professor Mather makes the following statement: —
‘And, but for the phantom of the Metropolitan Museum, the staff of the Boston Museum would have found the hour necessary to prove that the heraldry of the “ Mino ” tomb was preposterously unhistorical. Or, if they lacked the books and the herald, they would at least have written a letter to the accomplished herald of the Metropolitan Museum. A delay of two days and a two-cent stamp would have saved a considerable humiliation, not to mention a sum reckoned in six figures.’
It would be of interest to know what Professor Mather means by ‘preposterously unhistorieal.’ Before the tomb was purchased the heraldry was compared with that of the Savelli tombs and found to agree. Since the Professor’s criticism appeared, the best heraldic expert obtainable in this country has carefully examined the escutcheons and pronounces them absolutely correct. It seems a pity that Professor Mather should not have verified his statements, since a letter with ‘a two-cent stamp’ written to the Boston Museum would have disillusioned him as to these and other misunderstandings. The Boston Museum did not proceed in haste, for nearly a year elapsed during the negotiations, and the photograph of the tomb was seen two years before the acquisition. Nor did the phantom of the competition of another museum exist except in the Professor’s mind. There was not a hint of competition — in fact, no anxiety was felt excepting for its safe journey from Vienna.
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS