The Contributors' Column

Francis Bowes Sayre is a professor of law in Harvard University. As adviser in foreign affairs to the Siamese Government from 1953 to 1953. he negotiated treaties with a variety of Powers, great and small, which freed Siam from the burden of extraterritoriality.Henry Williamson’s name may one day rank with W. H. Hudson s. Both men deal with nature and both have a deep feeling of the innate cruelties of life; but the work of each is individual, and one could never be mistaken for the other. ∆ No person from Porlock interrupted the recording of James Norman Hall’s extraordinary dream. Albert Guerard is a professor of French literature in Stanford University, He has published in France an extensive volume, L’Avenir de Paris, discussing in detail the problems of which he writes so pleasantly in his paper. When his book appeared, Professor Guerard received a letter from Abbé Ernest Dimnet, author of The Brontë Sisters and The Art of Thinking. Abbe Dimnet wrote in part: —

I finished yesterday your Future of Parts and wrote at once to Madame Guerard. The book, I told her, is capital, and its programme persuasive.

I was astonished by its erudition, for I was not aware that you have been interested in these matters for twenty-five years. As for your general trend, I am delighted with it. ‘Greater Paris the savior of old Paris’ in a country more awake than ours would quickly become an irresistible slogan. Your ideas about my own street and quarter are just those that my own annoyances suggest. I am glad that you are brave enough to let your imagination take in possible reforms and to speak of them.

The book, surely, will make a powerful assault on our national apathy.

Ruth Pitter makes her first appearance in the Atlantic with an ode which we print with particular pleasure. Monica Shannon writes of the lighter side of Mexican revolution. Sir John Campbell concludes with his third paper the remarkable pictures of life in India which he preserved in his diary. Ian Colvin, literary critic and chief editorial writer of the London Morning Post, speaks as follows of Sir Denys Bray, whose reconstruction of Shakespeare’s sonnets he outlines in his appreciative paper: ’Sir Denys Bray is Foreign Secretary to the Indian Government, and has been busy rescuing foreigners from Afghanistan. If he were permitted, could he unravel the tangled skein of King Amanullah’s fortunes as he has done with William Shakespeare, I wonder . . .’ Sylvia Townsend Warner is known as the author of such small but inimitable volumes as Mr. Fortune s Maggot and The True Heart.Homer Henley has found art and morals less indifferent to each other than some aesthetes would have us believe. Henriette de Saussure Blanding builds her sonnet on the lasting foundation of the classics. Captain B. H. Liddell Hart is the military critic of the London Telegraph in succession to Colonel Repington. and is an accomplished biographer as well. The war diary of Rudolph Binding, which Captain Hart interprets with illuminating comment, is published in this country by Houghton Mifflin Company under the title, A Fatalist at War.

In a letter supplementing her strange account, Nina A. Ley writes: —

An uncle of mine who, as a metallurgist, spent much time some years ago in Arizona, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico, often heard accounts of moving armies of ants, though he never happened to witness one.

The Mexicans seemingly welcomed the moving ant colonies if they did n’t come at night. For, straight and exact as their march always was, when they entered a house they went all over the walls and ceiling, into every chink and crack. Thus, when they left, the shacks were rid of all the cockroaches and other insects which infested them—which the Mexicans could not get rid of in any other way.

To Northerners living in the Ozarks for the first time the ants were just one of the amazing and unusual things that happened.

Hans Zinsser is a professor of bacteriology in the Harvard Medical School, His paper is the substance of an address delivered at the Annual Commemoration Service in St. Paul’s Chapel on Sunday, January 7, 1921, in memory of those who during their lifetime advanced the honor of Columbia University. William Trufant Foster, director of the Poliak Foundation for Economic Research, and Waddill Catchings, manufacturer and banker, have for several years conducted a vigorous campaign for economic principles by which they believe permanent prosperity to be assured. President Hoover himself has paid their ideas the compliment of his expressed sympathy.

Anna Louise Strong is one of the two or three foreign correspondents who have been allowed to visit Soviet Central Asia in the last five years. George E. Putnam has served as a professor of economics at several colleges, and acted at one time as special expert to the United States Tariff Commission.

For those who may have missed an installment of Mazo de la Roche’sWhiteoaks of 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 Alayne1 to return with them to nurse him through his sickness.

Finch, after his return home, finds unexpected sympathy from his grandmother, who, over a hundred years old and venerated by the whole family, inspires him with her flickering spirit, until it is suddenly extinguished by death. Charles D. Stewart’s pen has been kept active answering letters of comment upon his paper, ‘The Tree as an Invention,’ which appeared in the April Atlantic. Two, in particular, of the letters which he has received and forwarded to us are so interesting that we cannot forbear quoting them.

HAMILTON, BERMUDA
DEAR SIR, -
If I understand you, the men of science are more or less in doubt as to what force is sufficient for getting water up the tree from the roots. But there is another problem associated with this. How does the tree contrive to get the starch content produced in the leaves and manufactured by sunlight out of the carbon dioxide of the air, all the way down even to the roots, and change the tender walls of the cells into solid wood substance or lignin? This is all accomplished between spring and fall. There must also be a current both ways. Have your botanists worked out this problem? You see I am hungering for mehr Licht, as Goethe did in his last hour. And I shall have to get it soon if I get it in this world, for 1 was ninety on Easter day just passed.
A. B. HERVEY

The experimenter caught in the act.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.
DEAR SIR, —
I have just been reading your fascinating article in the Atlantic Monthly, on ’The Tree as an Invention, and was particularly interested in your resume of the explanations offered for the ascent of the sap in trees.
I notice that no mention is made of the phenomenon of electro-osmosis, and it occurs to me that a suggestion in this direction — if it be not presumptuous — might be of interest. This phenomenon, I need hardly inform you, occurs when a difference of electric potential is maintained between the opposite sides of a porous membrane immersed in a liquid. In such a ease it will be found that the liquid will travel through the membrane from the region of low potential to the region of high potential.
About eight years ago I was preparing a thesis on this subject (for my degree), and among the experiments were some in which I took small square sticks of wood, about six inches long, into which, at one end, I fastened ordinary brass electric-wire terminals. These sticks of wood were placed with one end in a dilute solution of common salt, and the other end was attached (by means of the brass terminal) to a source of potential of 2000 volts approximately. Of course a slight current flowed from the wood to the solution, and it was found that the salt solution would rise from twenty to fifty times as rapidly by this means as it would by ordinary capillary attraction alone. This, of course, suggested to me that possibly the sap rises into a tree by some such action as this. As is well known, the static potential of the atmosphere increases at the rate of about 100 volts per metre, owing to the increasing concentration of free ions, as we rise above the surface of the earth. And it is also well known that if a large kite be sent up into the air, it will collect a sufficient charge to be detected. Now a tree is provided with an excellent mechanism, in its spreading branches and leaves, provided with points in many cases, for the collection of electric particles. So why should there not be a small electric current flowing toward the ground through the twigs, branches, and trunk of a tree, which would very materially assist in causing the sap to flow upward from the ground? I understand that the rise of the sap is greatest on clear, bright days, which is the very time when the production of ions by the actinic rays of the sun is greatest.
I mentioned these points in my thesis, but I must confess I was unable to detect any stir in the scientific world on their account. I have always intended to come back to this matter, and make some quantitative experiments, but unfortunately have never had the time or the opportunity.
A. M. WRIGHT

Mr. Stewart replies: — motion at once, and the world’s power problems would be solved.
Three years ago this spring I was walking through the woods near my house, where a maple tree had been cut down in the fall; and now, as the sap began to rise in the spring, a solitary bee, the first I had seen, was at work on the top of the stump, filling up on the bountiful supply of sweetness. The sap not only wet the top of the stump, but overflowed on the hark and dampened the soil and leaves at the base with a liberal and continuous flow. Being tlien interested particularly in bees, I stopped to look at this early worker; hut at once I found even more to interest me in that overflow of sap. Anyone who had not some primary notion of physics would naturally suppose that this was capillary attraction, the mere lamp-wick principle, working in the upward grain of the tree. But this was not the true case; this upward flow was due to root pressure — to osmosis acting through the osmotic membrane that surrounds all the roots of a tree. Capillary attraction can never cause a liquid to overflow the top of a tube or a collection of fine tubes; it can only raise the water to the top — and that to a limited height. And the reason that a lamp wick has a continuous upward flow is that the oil is continually being removed from the upper surface or end of the wick; and this is replaced by more from below.
As to future experiment, you evidently intend to put such dead sticks of wood to further tests. That is correct. Biologists, in their effort to solve the secrets of the upward flow, have been at pains to kill completely all living cells in the trunk of a tree, throughout its thickness, leaving the upper parts alive; and the result was that the sap flowed upward the same as ever. This was satisfactory proof that the rise of the sap was not due to any live or heartlike action in the cells of the tree — that the tubes were in fact mere inert tubes of cellulose.
Now let us ask what the nature of your future experiment shall be. You want to determine not simply whether the upward capillary flow is freer and greater in quantity under the electric influence than without, but whether that results in raising the water to greater height. What could be simpler then, for such experiment, than to take a very long stick of wood — one reaching beyond the limits of unaided capillary attraction — and conduct the test with that? A wire extended upward for a hundred feet or two and connected with the end of the stick with electric terminals would give you the difference in potential between the upper air and the ground without any resort to an artificial source of electricity, and thus duplicate the tree’s natural state of existence. Then find if it works.
I might here add that biologists do not eonsider the tubes in a tree as an osmotic membrane in making their calculations. The osmotic membrane is that which surrounds each little root of the tree; and it is this which makes the osmotic pressure which forces water to a certain height under certain conditions. Therefore, to duplicate the natural conditions of a tree, I should say that the end of your stick ought to be covered with an osmotic membrane of greater or less extent.
I conceive it to be a virtue in a writer not to be too sure of things on which he is not absolutely and finally posted; and so I merely venture the opinion that if actual power could be obtained by uniting the atmosphere at a moderate height with the ground, we should have the practical equivalent of perpetual motion.
However, in any proposal to put a theory to practical test, — the scientist’s last resort If not his first, — mere mental effort can afford to set aside its usual procedure and throw all responsibility on the outcome.
CHARLES D. STEWART

HARTFORD, WISCONSIN
DEAR MR. WRIGHT, —
Of a number of letters I have received, yours is one of the most interesting, the reason being that it takes certain scientific facts and states them in a way that makes at least a tangible theory. It is worthy of notice, if not as an explanation of the rise of sap to great heights, then anyway as one of the forces that may be affecting plant life.
Like a true scientist you say that you have been intending to make some ‘quantitative experiments.’ Let me confine my reply to making certain suggestions.
Regarding the experiment you have already performed, you say that the capillary flow was ‘twenty to fifty times’ as great under the electric influence as without it.
You know that water or other fluid will not rise in a stick of wood, or a lamp wick, or other such conductor, and overflow the top in any degree at all. Whether the stick or the wick is ten inches high or ten feet, the liquid will rise exactly to the top and there come to a stop without overflowing. If this were not so, we should have perpetual

A condensed bibliography of Prohibition.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
In view of the comments concerning the telegram from the School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University as reproduced in the Contributors’ Column of the April Atlantic Monthly, the following statement seems warranted. The 200 copies of the February Atlantic Monthly were ordered for distribution among the freshmen because of President Lowell’s article entitled ‘Reconstruction and Prohibition.’ The freshmen concerned are enrolled in a course called the Introduction to Responsible Citizenship. I he purpose of this course is to arouse interest and develop insight into current social situations of a controversial character; that is, such situations as confront, the intelligent, citizen to-day. The method is to bring to the students’ attention readings which, taken altogether fairly, illuminate the problem from various significant angles. In the discussion of Prohibition the readings included a general treatment of the Prohibition Movement from 1915 to 1924, by Dr. Herbert Shentou, the reprint of Senator Borah’s speech before the United States Senate on ‘Obedience to Law,’ an article by Dr. Haven Emerson on ‘Prohibition and Public Health,’ and one on ‘Prohibition and Prosperity’ from the Survey Graphic, by an anonymous economist. This series was written by writers who are favortible to 1 rolnbition. On the other side were included the following titles: An International Survey of Conditions under Prohibition by the Moderation League, the annual report of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. President Lowell’s Atlantic Monthly article, entitled, ‘Reconstruction and Prohibition,’ and a series of articles criticizing the operation of the law, printed in various issues of the Outlook. Although the above readings fall far short of an exhaustive survey of the Prohibition situation, it is believed that they offer a fair basis for assessing current conditions and for raising the question in the students’ minds as to what should be the intelligent citizen’s attitude with regard to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act.
WILLIAM E. MOSHER, Director
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs

Further parallels.

FITCHBURG, MASSACHUSETTS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Analogies are not always convincing, but they are often interesting and Sometimes illuminating. The one drawn by President Lowell between present conditions under Prohibition and those of Reconstruction days after the Civil War suggests others between the present struggle against the liquor traffic and that against the slave power in that earlier day.
In both instances the issue was forced by an institution which threatened to control the politics of the country. The slave power began the war because it saw the political power it had wielded beginning to fail. The liquor traffic forced the issue of Prohibition by its arrogant resistance to war-time prohibition, which was aimed to prevent the diversion to its purposes of an enormous share of the nation’s food supplies at a time when whole peoples were starving. In both instances the nation was struggling to free itself from the strangle hold of institutions swollen with power which threatened the whole civil fabric.
In both instances the enemy found its sympathizers mainly in the aristocratic element of society. The Copperhead faction then, like the wet faction now, prided itself upon its superior social standing, and with equal unction quoted Scripture in defense of its position. The slogans then were States’ rights and property rights, and now they are States’ rights and personal rights. The common people in both conflicts have stood by the government. In only one particular does the analogy fail. The immigrant population was heartily antislavery, while now it Is as ardently pro-liquor. The wet states are those that combine inherited wealth and immigrant population, while the states of native population and moderate wealth are dry. Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which so distinguished themselves in the recent campaign, while reckoned among the old states, are in point of population the very newest states in the Union, and at the same time they have their full quota of pedigrees.
But if our analogy fails in this particular, it promises to hold good in the final and most, significant phase. In each case the government seemed to win. Emancipation and Prohibition were both enacted and victory was celebrated, while in both cases realization has lagged far behind the proclaimed decision. Emancipation, as President Ixjwell makes clear, is far from complete sixty-five years after, and Prohibition is proceeding with leaden feet. No doubt both have been retarded by the aggressiveness of many genuinely patriotic and philanthropic partisans who lacked patience to await the gradual process. But they have been retarded also by those who insist that equality of opportunity for the colored race is impossible in a, white man’s country, and by those who insist that Prohibition can never be enforced in a thirsty land. Now, as then, the fanatical pros and the fanatical antis unite to hinder progress. Democracy always must muddle through.
But in both instances it becomes increasingly clear that the nation must ultimately see the thing through or surrender to an insidious and relentless foe to democracy. In both conflicts the light is breaking. The colored man is coming into his own, and there is little doubt that some day the antislavery and anticaste amendments will come into full effect.
And in the later issue, the President’s appeal to good citizens to quit playing into the hands of criminals is certain to bear fruit, while the highly significant benefits that President Lowell concedes to Prohibition are gaining recognition in the public mind. The automobile is making the menace of the liquor habit plain even to the wayfaring man, anti so justifying in his eyes the persona] inconvenience the law puts him to.
He must soon see that, the real issue is only secondarily one of personal habits, but primarily is between the people and the organized traffic of which speak-easies and blind pigs are and always have been as characteristic as the saloon, a traffic always unscrupulous, corrupt and corrupting, defiant of all law, and allied with vice and crime.
WILLIAM D. PARKINSON

The defense rests.

CHICO, CALIFORNIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, -
No doubt the article bearing the title ‘ A Study in Still Life’ in the Contributors’ Club of your magazine for April caused much amusement to your readers.
It also served to demonstrate that the writer is no kin to Lucy. You remember the article closed with the witty sentence: ‘Certainly not too bright!’
When I read the article I vividly recalled a scene in my mother’s kitchen nearly sixty years ago. My mother wore a brown calico dress. She was sitting in a sunny window embroidering. With some effort. — for I was very small, — 1 lugged a large book to her and begged her to read to me. She read in her beautiful way, ‘We Are Seven.’ I had just lost a brother and sister, and the poem made a deep impression on my childish mind.
When I was a bride of eighteen someone gave me a book of poems. It lies open before me as I write, ragged anti worn-out, like the old poems that nourished us in our childhood. In the book is a beautiful woodcut of the man and the moron, Lucy, and candor compels me to confess that curls are, indeed, clustering around her head. Well, I loved the poem and I love the picture, though I know now, thanks to your contributor, that I should n’t have had any joy of them during the long years. I’m not bright, but I’m not too old to learn.
How did it happen that the writer omitted the two lines: —
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me?
Those two lines should have made a good subject for brightness to try its wit upon.
C. M. M.

We are enabled to reproduce exactly as it reached us the following copy of verses by a granddaughter of A. Edward Newton, through the kindness of her father, E. Swift Newton.

SHEEP

Saturday April 20, 1929