There are few born story-tellers in the world, but almost everybody has one story at least to tell. Human experience is as interesting to hear as it is to relate. We should like readers of the Atlantic to realize that the editors follow with sympathy and attention manuscripts from friends entirely unknown to them. To write for the sake of writing is a sterile pursuit; to write with sincerity something sincerely felt is often to make literature.

To Harriet Connor Brown has been awarded the Atlantic prize of $5000 for ‘the most interesting biography’ to reach us by the first of May. More than five hundred manuscripts were submitted in the competition, by authors of many nationalities, relating the lives of every imaginable type of human being, eminent and obscure. Readers of the story of Grandmother Brown will realize why a life which in itself has embraced a crucial century of our history, and which in its ancestral roots taps the very fountain springs of the Republic, should have triumphed over the many interesting and significant human records which the Atlantic received. ▵ A lecturer in astrophysics at McGill University, A. Vibert Douglas exemplifies the imaginative temperament which the common man instinctively feels ought to he characteristic of astronomers. ▵ Listening to the speech of the Southern mountaineers, Percy MaeKaye has gathered words ‘with the dew still on them,’ as Lowell said of Chaucer. The story of the British Lady will eventually appear, with others of its kind, in a book entitled ‘Weathergoose—Woo!’ to be published by Longmans, Green and Company.

Born in New Jersey, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Mary Lee Davis graduated from Wellesley, took a master’s degree at Radcliffe, and, as the wife of a mining engineer, has become accustomed to camps and outposts in the far quarters of the earth. Robert Dean Frisbie is now in this country after his years as a South Sea trader and observer. The voyage to San Francisco required one hundred and thirty days. ‘Provisions gave out,’ Mr. Frisbie writes, ‘and we nearly all starved at sea. . . .’ S. Foster Damon, whose second book of poems will appear this fall, is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. ▵ The author of ‘Fear’ has occupied, severally and together, the posts of publisher, essayist, and critic. Marian Storm describes a virtually undiscovered town. ‘None of my friends in Mexico,’ she writes, ‘even those who have lived there more than twenty-five years, knew about Uruapan. I have n’t met one foreigner who has been there. It takes two days, by the narrow-gauge road, from the capital. No one — I least of all — had any idea that there was such a place. It seemed as if I were just led.’ Charles D. Stewart is known to all Atlantic readers as a naturalist who illumines fact with insight. In ‘The Art of Dying’ he turns from nature to man at his most critical hour. Charles Hanson Towne, of New York, is a poet, novelist, and editor.

Merle Colby is manager of one of the oldest among Boston bookstores. Charles Morrow Wilson sends us his interesting study from Arkansas. Stanley Casson, an English archaeologist, has gained an intimate acquaintance with the lands of Grecian heritage. His most recent volume, Some Modern Sculptors, appeared this spring. Mohammed Leopold Weiss is a well-known journalist and traveler, whose articles on the Near East have appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung and elsewhere. Anna Louise Strong, after extensive study in American universities and experience as a social worker, went, to Russia, and came to know intimately the course of Russian action in China and in Soviet Central Asia.

DENVER, COLORADO
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
I noticed by an item in the daily press that Mr. Robert Dean Friable, who contributed an article in your April number regarding Mrs. Turtle laying her eggs, landed this week at San Francisco, and expected to return at once to his far-away home in the South Pacific. It occurred to me that a bit of information that I once ran on to might be of some advantage to him. Some years ago I met in New York a gentleman who had just landed a shipment of green turtles from the southernmost island of the Bahamas, which he claimed to have raised. These turtles were all about the same size, and he claimed of the same age. As I remember, the dates they were hatched were scratched in the shells. His statement was that some five years before that time he went to this island from Florida with the intention of finding some way to domesticate these turtles; that he had gathered all the information relative to their habits, characteristics, and propagation that he could, which was exceedingly little. On the south side of this island, where a narrow inlet made a small pond into which a creek emptied, he leased a tract of land. He then built a wall of loose rock across the inlet so that the sea could ebb and flow through it into the pond, thus keeping the pond supplied with moving sea water. With this enclosure completed, he proceeded to stock his pond. With the help of some natives from Santo Domingo he procured some young turtles that cost him a substantial sum of money. These he placed in the pond, and fed them plentifully; they made no effort to escape, and soon learned to look for feeding time like domestic animals. I believe he stated the female turtle has to be some twenty years of age before she begins to lay. This made it necessary for him to find some other method of securing his stock; hence with the help of the above-mentioned natives he carried on a search for turtle eggs, A nest was found and moved by making a similar nest in a tub of sand, putting the eggs into it, and gently carrying the tub to a place near his cabin. He placed a roof above the tut) so as to keep the rain off and enclosed it so as to keep away nocturnal creatures that prey upon these nests. If I remember correctly there were one hundred and twenty turtles hatched from this nest. These were placed in pens in the pond that he had made with wire netting stretched from post to post driven into the ground. I believe he dug a trench, drove the posts into the bottom of the trench, attached the netting, and filled up the trench so as to have the lower edge of the netting below the bottom of the pond. He claimed it was necessary to keep young ones separate from the older and larger turtles, because at feeding time the larger would eat up all the food, as do domestic animals and fowls. Later this man secured some turtles that were fully matured, and he described the making of the nests and laying of the eggs as did Mr. Frisbie in his article, lie built a wire-screen fence along the top of the sea wall to keep the turtles from escaping into the sea, though he claimed he never found them trying to escape. A very short time after I met this gentleman he died suddenly in Florida, and I never learned what became of his turtle farm.
JAMES L. CLARK

The other side of mass production,
DETROIT, MICHIGAN
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
I have read with great interest Mr. Edward A. Filene’s ‘Mass Production Makes a Better World,’ which appeared in the May issue. With Mr. Filene I agree regarding various benefits that mass production is giving to society, and I believe that its march cannot be retarded. Mr. Filene in his article says, in part, ‘There is no ground for the fear that machinery and the consequent increased productivity will cause more than temporary unemployment. In the motor industry there is no evidence of even temporary unemployment due to increased production.’ In my opinion, this statement contains a substantial error. From 1923 to the middle of 1928, especially in Detroit, where the greatest percentage of the automobile industry is centred, we have had two depressions. During this sixyear period we have had nearly three and onehalf years of good stability and two and one-half years bad stability. When it is bad stability in the automobile industry thousands of workingmen are idle. In an endeavor to create a livable working balance between the workers and those idle, periodical lay-offs are instituted. In other words, for a period of weeks the workers become idle and the idle become workers.
Let us see what the United States Department of Labor says in this matter. It reports that ‘the automobile industry shows the greatest instability of employment of any of the industries so far analyzed by the bureau in its series of studies of this subject.’ The report says further, ‘The annual averages show consistently bad stability conditions with little or no improvement apparent. In fact, with the exception of 1926, each year showed a lower average than 1923, . . . For every year since 1923. except 1926, the stability index for more than one half of the plants was under 85.’
I abridged the greater part of the U. S. Labor Bureau’s statement, which is unfavorable to the statement of Mr. Filene, and I am of the opinion that if the exact statistics and records of all lay-offs in automobile industries were accurately kept the showing would create a very unsound ground for Mr. Filene’s statement.
The workingmen in Detroit and vicinities have purchased homes and lots, yet there has been foreclosure on tens of thousands of deferred contracts and mortgages. This is a serious situation, and naturally the majority of the losers were the common workingmen.
In my opinion mass production presents a great and serious problem to the American nation. It is a problem for which a solution must he found.
Of all of the theories propounded to date, I believe that the plan either to limit workingday hours or to put mass production on a schedule basis is capable of bringing us nearest to a satisfactory condition in this regard.
N. L. MANGOUNI

From the Amen corner.
OAKLAND, MARYLAND
DEAR ATLANTIC,—
To the paper In your May number, ‘These Sad Young Men,’I would say Amen and Amen. Perhaps lust and hunger rule the world. I do not know. But if this is true, 1 do not think it either contemptible, pitiable, or amusing that man has transformed them into love and ambition. On the contrary I think this sublimation, as it is called, too great an achievement for man himself to understand. By virtue of something really sublime he is greater than he knows, and he should be honored for it instead of scorned. Of course the original constituents remain. If they did not, the magic would lose much of its wonder: coexistence of the ideal and the material in one being. The properties of manure continue to offend us, though they enrich roses that would grace Heaven. I cannot deny that the Venus of Milo Is a mineral deposit; I do not wish to; but neither can your materialist aver that she is not a glorious image. Dr. Kruteh and Mr. Huxley are lumps of wettish salt, true enough, but their brine sparkles in spite of them, and it may even trickle into eternity.
Faithfully yours,
FREDERICK THAYER, JR.

We have already printed a number of letters inspired by Charles D. Stewart’s paper, ’The Tree as an Invention,’ in the April number, but we cannot forbear adding a few paragraphs from two letters received by Mr. Stewart from a correspondent whom he describes as follows: —

Alphens Baker Hervey, of New England ancestry, but horn about thirty miles from Binghamton, New York, was for six years president of St. Lawrence University at Canton, New York (1888-94). He began attending that university when it had four students and one teacher, and he was one of the students. That was in 1858. Now the university has 3700 students and 89 instructors and owns property valued at three and a half million dollars.
Dr. Hervey has written several scientific books, his specialty being microscopy. He translated a treatise on microscopy from the German. One of his books is The Algœ of Bermuda. Of education he says that there are many definitions, some stressing the ‘humanities’ and others ‘science.’ He has a definition of his own: ‘Education consists in establishing intelligent contacts and relations between the mind of man and the rest of the universe.’ As he says, ‘That leaves nothing out.’
On October 12, 13, 14, 1928, students ami alumni of St. Lawrence University celebrated what they called the Hervey Anniversaries, commemorating the seventieth year since Dr. Hervey became a student, and the fortieth since he became president. Many distinguished people were present. A booklet was issued in remembrance of the event. It was at this time, when he was eighty-nine years old, that he became Doctor Hervey.

Dr. Hervey himself writes: —
HAMILTON, BERMUDA
PROFESSOR CHARLES D. STEWART
DEAR SIR: —
I have read your article in the Atlantic about trees with great interest and pleasure. I am a professed admirer of trees, not only for their beauty and grandeur, but also for their moral character and exemplary good behavior. They are all pacifists. They are good neighbors one with the other. They are not critical about their neighbors’ clothes or how they shall bring up their children. I like to go among them to find rest and comfort for troubled hours.
I don’t think you need to be endowed with the genius of a ‘poet, a prophet, or a seer’ to see that there is need of something more than chemical and physical forces to invent a tree and build it out of the crude matter of the soil beneath and the air above. All you need is just a fair share of ordinary, everyday common sense.
These materialists make me tired. They don’t admit there is such a thing as life. They class it with phlogiston. They have in their dictionary no such word as ‘mind.’ It is the cells of the brain and other parts of the nervous system that produce thought, will, choice, purpose, and even consciousness, I am told. Even the universe itself is a crude material automaton. That certainly reduces it to its lowest terms.
I suppose I am an extremist on the other tack. I have a theory that all living things are endowed with a certain amount of intelligence, proportioned to their needs. If there are exceptions to that they will be found among humans, especially the philosophers.
I have seen marked exhibitions of that in the lowest forms of animal life, the Protozoa. I once watched for hours the doings of a so-called ‘sun animalcule’ under my microscope. This is a minute creature consisting of a ball of translucent cells from which radiate slender threads of protoplasm in all directions something over twice as long as the diameter of the ball. This suggested its name. In rolling about in the water some of these tentacles touched a diatom lying on the bottom of the water on my slide. Immediately other tentacles reached over and fastened upon the plant, which they slowly drew in till it touched the surface of the ball. Immediately a depression began to form in that and deepened till the whole of the diatom was buried in it, and there it was held till all that was nutritious in the plant was absorbed. The shell, which is of glass, was left in his body.
I very much wondered how he would rid himself of it, for he had no limbs of any kind. He proceeded at once to show me how. I saw a depressed ring in the body exactly in the plane of the plant begin to form. This slowly deepened till at last the ball was cut in two and the two halves drew apart and the shell of the diatom dropped out. Very simple, but so far as I know there is nothing in chemistry or physics that would have taught him. Then he brought his two halves together again and was ready for the next catch.

BALDWIN, L. I.
DEAR PROFESSOR STEWART : —
I was very glad to get your letter yesterday. You are not the first one I have surprised about my age. I have a saying that when we old fellows get so old that we have nothing else to boast of we brag about our age. Well, I’ve been doing that now for some time. I’m not only the oldest alumnus of my Alma Mater, but the oldest clergyman in our fellowship. . . .
My mother lived to be ninety-six and my father’s mother lived to be ninety-two. She was born in 1753. When a child I have heard her tell of hearing the firing of the British fleet at the battle of Bunker Hill. She, a woman of twentytwo, was living near Boston. My grandmother had seen Washington and looked upon him as one of the gods. She would n’t allow unvbody to speak slightingly of her hero. . . .

I shall look with much interest for your next paper in the Atlantic. I have been a reader of the Atlantic, off and on, since the time when Dr. Holmes was having his ‘Breakfast Table Talks.’ There are no more like him and Lowell and Emerson and Whittier.
The good Lord seems to be making no new forms of genius any more than He is new forms of trees. We can transplant trees from other climes, but not new men of genius. I wish we could.
Very truly yours,
A. B. HERVEY

With all this talk about the wonders of science, these inventions ought to be easy.

HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I wish you would encourage the more ingenious of your subscribers to make three inventions that for years I have longed for. They are very different from one another, but each, equally, would fill a need. The first would be some sort of automatic recorder of the letters we write, in our minds, in bed, and that have absolutely flown by the time we reach paper and pen. They say just what we would, so perfectly, with such rounded periods and exact shades of meaning, such wit and distinction, that some little instrument to pin them to permanence must be a possibility — perhaps some sort of mental and spiritual fountain pen, which, later, could be run out on to a chart.
And then, when we have to tell the doctor how we feel, instead of the circumlocution of symptoms on our part, and the discounting of the personal equation on his part, why could n’t there be a kind of pressing-the-button to produce a precisely similar synthetic pain, which would save time and talk. Just for an instant, punch our consciousness into his, and the thing would be done.
The third invention would be a machine into which we could feed, say, three old gowns, two blouses, and a hat, and receive from the other end one absolutely fresh garment — or all of last year’s wardrobe ground out into one veritable dernier cri. The benefactor who would invent such a sartorial sausage machine would receive the gratitude of women — anyway, mine.
ALICE GRAY TRUSLOW

The song that Schubert forgot.

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
The interesting account in the May Atlantic of the painting by Sargent that the artist himself failed to recognize reminds me of an incident in the life of Schubert, related by Sir George Grove. To quote from the latter’s dictionary: —
‘No sketches, no delay, no anxious period of preparation, no revision, appear to have been necessary. He had but to read the poem, to surrender himself to the torrent, and to put down what was given him to say, as it rushed through his mind. ... It would seem that the results did not always fix themselves in the composer’s memory as permanently as if they had been the effect of longer and more painful elaboration. Vogl tells an anecdote about this which is very much to the point. On one occasion he received from Schubert some new songs, but being otherwise occupied could not try them over at the moment. When he was able to do so he was particularly pleased with one of them, but as it was too high for his voice, he had it copied in a lower key. About a fortnight afterward they were again making music together, and Vogl placed the transposed song before Schubert on the desk of the piano. Schubert tried it through, liked it, and said in his Viennese dialect, “I say! the song’s not so bad; whose is it?” so completely, in a fortnight, had it vanished from his mind! Sir Walter Scott attributed a song of his own to Byron; but this was in 1828, after his mind had begun to fail.’
JOSHUA L. DAILY, JR.

Terra Incognita.
OLD CAMP RUCKER RANCH
DOUGLAS, ARIZONA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
We were very much relieved when the last issue of the Atlantic arrived, for we had cause to fear that the ‘Hub of the Universe’ was no longer on its axle. My Texas husband was particularly concerned. He asks, ‘Where is your Yankee highbrow magazine?’ and reads it through before I begin. Although our post office is Douglas, we live nearly sixty miles away, in the Chiricahua Mountains. Not long ago, being in a hurry to send off some mail, we drove thirty miles to a town which consists of a garage, blacksmith’s shop, and general store in which is the post office.
The postmistress took my package, which was addressed to Malden, Massachusetts, and retired with it to her corner cubby-hole to figure out the parcel-post, charges. After some delay she came out to tell me that she was unable to locate Malden. I told her that it was a suburb of Boston. For ten minutes longer she delved into books and consulted maps, then, with a tone of exasperation, said, ‘I can’t find it. Boston used to be on the map, but it is n’t there now.’

We compromised by my offering to pay postage to ‘the fartherest zone there is.’
Lest New Englanders be too scornful, here is another side to the picture.
After a year in boarding school on the Atlantic coast, a girl from our part of the country went to the railway station to buy a ticket to her home in Tucson, affectionately known in the Southwest as the ‘Old Pueblo.’
After fruitless search, the ticket agent said, ‘I can’t find it on the map and I don’t see why you should want to go to such a place. I will sell you a ticket to St. Louis, and if you still want to go to Arizona, the agent there may be able to find Tucson.’
‘See America first’ is n’t such a bad slogan.
MARY KIDDER RAK

You can lead a horse to water — that is, if you can find a horse.

GOWANDA STATE HOSPITAL
HELMUTH, N. Y.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
An interesting example, to me, of the giving in perpetuity, as mentioned in Julius Rosenwald’s article on ‘Principles of Public Giving,’ in the May issue, was the establishment on Mt. Desert of various watering places and buckets, the money to be used for that purpose only, to supply thirsty horses with water. Now there are so few horses, they are used little. ANNE E. PERKINS, M.D.

From an insurance agent.
CHICAGO, Illinois
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
The account by George Miksch Sutton, in the June number, of his almost very serious predicament when he went into a hollow log after a turkey vulture reminds me of a story that I heard some time ago, of a man who got started through a hollow log, having gone in to keep dry during a sudden shower. The moisture from the rain caused the partly rotten wood to swell, and the unfortunate occupant found that he could make no progress either forward or back.
After several hours of unavailing effort to free himself he realized that his situation was really serious, and that unless relief came from some unexpected source his earthly career was about to end.
Then he was overwhelmed with thoughts of his various shortcomings and the futility of his life, and when he thought of how mean he had been never to purchase any life insurance it made him feel so small that he was able easily to crawl out of the log. H. LOUIS AUTEN