The Contributors' Column

William H. Townsend (‘Lincoln and Liquor’) is a lawyer of Lexington, Kentucky : his article represents the first search ever made into the original sources which reveal Honest Abe’s attitude toward drink. The repeal of prohibition gives his findings timely as well as historical importance. Years ago Mr, Townsend became interested in Lincoln both as a collector and as a scholar, and so persistent has been his zeal that he now owns one of the largest collections of Lincolniana in the country, including among his prizes Lincoln s first law book, From his studies several volumes have issued, the most recent being Lincoln and His Wife’s Home Town. ▵ So trenchant has been the political thought of Harold J. Laski (‘ The Roosevelt Experiment’) that it may be said to have polarized students of government into two broad groupings — those who sympathize with its philosophy and those who do not. Mr. Laski’s university connections have been numerous, including Oxford, McGill, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, the London School of Economics, Cambridge; he is now Professor of Political Science at the University of London. Author of more than a dozen important books, he is a member of the Fabian Society, and is active in the inner councils of the British Labor Party. ▵ To the Yale University faculty Chauncey Brewster Tinker is Sterling Professor of English; in the affections of the students he is ‘ Tink.’ One would have to be ‘up betimes’ and ‘to bed late’ to find another essay as mellow and delightful as ‘ The Great Diarist.’ Johnson O’Connor (‘Vocabulary and Success’) is Director of the Human Engineering Laboratories at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, and also Assistant Professor of Industrial Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. ▵ Novelist and country gentleman, Philip Curtiss (‘The Twilight of the Business Woman’) will be pleasantly remembered for his ’Sunday’ in the May issue of last year, a paper which brought in appreciative letters by the score. ▵ The son of a Lutheran clergyman, Paul Hoffman graduated at Harvard in 1932 and launched himself into a literary career. ‘ Late Love’ is his first short story, but he has already published an autobiographical volume, Seven Yesterdays. Concerning it, who was it that wrote this letter to him? ‘I am pleased with Seven Yesterdays very pleased, I am pleased with you and I am pleased with me in you, I like your writing and what is important is that there is construction instead of intention and so you ought to be able to go on which I do very much hope for you. I do desperately like anybody to go on. But you will. There is construction not only in general but also in detail and that is very important. So you see that I am pleased and I like telling you so.’

E. F. Benson, the accomplished British author of As We Were and As We Are, completes his panorama of social change with ‘As We Have Become.’ ▵ For many happy years Florence Converse was a member of the Atlantic staff. ’Marx and Lenin Made a Plan’ and ‘ Bread Line,’which we printed in January 1932, are parts of a long poem, Efficiency Expert, which will be brought out as a book by the John Day Company in the early spring. ▵ Among anthropologists it is all in the day’s work to seek out far corners of the earth where human society can be studied ’in the raw,’ but when a woman anthropologist spends a year all alone among the savages of a tropical island, that is news us well as science. Hortense Powdermaker is connected with the Yale Institute of Human Relations; ‘At Horne on the Equator’ is made up of selections from the letters she wrote to her family and friends. The scientific results of her expedition were recently issued by W. W. Norton in book form under the title, Life in Lesu.Carol Bache is an American woman who has long resided in Japan. In ‘The Genteel Burglar’ she relates the true story of the would-be thief who is now her gardener. Henry S. Drinker, Jr. (‘A Neglected Language’) is a Philadelphia lawyer who makes music his hobby. Each of his four children, aged from twelve to nineteen, has learned to read vocal music, to sing, and to play a variety of instruments. ’I have taught them all piano myself,’Mr. Drinker writes, ‘usually before breakfast.’ His principal delight, however, is the amateur chorus which he conducts. ‘Beginning with about twenty people, we now have more than two hundred who sing with us. Me meet seven or eight times during the winter, and between our big parties we always have several smaller ones at which we read new works so as to choose the most interesting for the big chorus.’ I he mellowing influence of all this is perhaps reflected in Mr. Drinker’s two publications: twenty-live years ago he wrote a three-volume treatise on the Interstate Commerce Act; last year its ‘sequel’ appeared — a small book on The Chamber Music of Johannes Brahms. ▵ A kindred spirit is Louisa Butler (‘If the Lilies Are Down’) — her love of poetry is combined, she says, with ’a special passion for singing in choruses.’ ▵ The Flying Drakes, Francis and Katharine, have recently completed their most ambitious‘hop’ — a tour of South America by plane. ‘Airway Down the Andes’ sums up one segment of their impressions. ▵ Poet and novelist, William Rose Benét (‘Seesaw ‘) is Contributing Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.Charles D. Stewart is a man of many talents, not one of which is buried. For example, nothing delights him more than to try to penetrate by exact observation such everyday mysteries as how spiders spin their webs, how cats wash their faces, or, as here (‘A Bird’s Reason’), how robins and orioles build their nests. For further evidence of this happy faculty, sec his letter printed below. ▵ In ‘The Fight on the Securities Act,’Bernard Flexner writes from the experience of three and a half decades at the bar, during which period he has been intimately familiar with the manifold requirements of corporation finance. But the test of the Securities Art will be a very practical one, and a good many people are asking themselves, ‘ Will it help our business morals if in our serious plight it hurts our business interests?

A challenge to cats.

Dear Atlantic, —
Referring to Mr. Charles D. Stewart’s letter in the Contributors’ Column of your December issue, I wish to take exception to his flat and unqualified statement regarding the household cat that, ‘except in the monkey or ape tribe, no animal uses its front paws so much for purposes of manipulation — so much in the way of hands.’
To demonstrate my point,, I offer as an example the raccoon, one of our most prehensile and intelligent animals. He is much cleverer with his paws than is the cat, and he is quite capable of picking up and handling any small object. Many woodsmen are familiar with the beaver and the uses to which he puts his front feet when building dams, houses, caves, and canals. The little muskrat shakes an able front paw, and builds quite marvelous houses of wood, grasses, moss, and mud. That famous collector of gems, shells, and collar buttons, the pack rat, builds complicated storehouses largely with the aid of his front paws. Squirrels revolve hits of food between their paws at almost incredible speed, and they can ascend or descend a tree head or tail foremost. A cat, once up a tree, often needs the fire department to help him down.
Neither is it my observation that keepers of cats are a more ‘refined and discriminating class of people’ than keepers of other animals.
Lest my remarks be regarded as prejudiced, allow me to say that I do like cals. During my lifetime I have owned eleven ‘steady’ cats and about ten times that many kittens. On the other hand, I have spent many years in tall timber and in close contact with the animals mentioned above.
ROBERT HALL VALENTINE Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

A defense of cats.

Dear Atlantic,—
The raccoon, with his neat wrist and kid-gloved manner of handling things, is seen at his best when he is washing his food at the edge of a pond or stream. He laves a piece of lettuce back and forth and cleans whatever he gets with the utmost particularity. He knows how to open a shellfish or get at the inside of a crab. Otherwise he is a bear, and has the bear’s skill in climbing.
Particular instances of dexterity may be quoted with regard to particular animals; the squirrel can twirl a nut, the bear can drink out of a bottle. In fact, the horse has a certain skill in his club-footed way. I have been surprised, after having my horse newly shod, to see him delicately seratch behind his ear with the new chunk of iron on one of his hind feet. But this is dexterity, not manipulation. It is the manipulative power of a cat that I spoke of, and a certain mechanical instinct.
You never saw a bear or a fox use one finger at a time. A cat will. When you are passing a cat lying on a chair and he wishes to detain you, he is likely to throw his paw out and hook you with just the claw on his forefinger. Or the same cat, resting, may lazily throw his paw up in the air and hook that forefinger in the openings of a wicker chair. It is a very selective use of that one finger of his.
If you are approaching a door with a cat in your arms, the cat will almost always stretch forth his arm in readiness to push the door open before you have reached it. He is full of self-help, and does not simply depend upon you. Moreover, a cat knows what a knob is for, and will stand up and try to work it. I had a cat that would push a door open from one side and pull it from the other if there was a slight opening to get his paw through.
On a farm here in Wisconsin we have a cat that was raised on milk from a bottle. It was a large, heavy bottle with a nipple. As the cat grew older it learned how to help itself. It would roll over on its back and support the bottle on all fours, the hind legs raising it to the right angle to let the milk flow while the front paws supported the bottle and handled it at the mouth. I am sending the editor of the Allantic a photograph of the cat doing this; and, while he cannot print it, he will see that it is no mere animal story.¹ Can you even imagine a fox or a dog doing that? This is what I mean by manipulative power.
As for comparing the fox and the muskrat with the cat — the fox is all feet, and the muskrat, carrying sticks in his mouth to make a house, is accomplishing no more than does a bird with its bill.
The cat’s claws are retractive, and that is a part of the manipulative equipment. Imagine a steel disk rotating on its centre, and out of this cut away enough metal to make it like one big tooth of a saw still rotating on its centre. That is the claw of a cat; and it shields itself by rotating back into a little horny ease. The claw of the fox or the bear or even the talons of the eagle are not retractile. Their claws are merely hung on them; they must always he on the outside. It is these sharp instruments, carried in a case, that the eat is so careful not to scratch you with if he has learned to like you; or to let out just a trifle if he wishes to correct you. And this fine instrumentation is a part of his manipulative ability. Altogether, much may be said for the cat ; but I might also explain that the reason I mentioned this animal in particular was that all readers have access to the cat as a source of observation.
Feed a cat something soft, such as mashed potatoes with a little grease or gravy in them. Since he is not fitted to eat such food, he will manage to do it by pushing the potato into his mouth with his paw. He will use that paw just as a child uses its hands to push in the food that threatens to fall out. Or go to bed in a very dark room in which there is a cat that likes you. I had a cat that would take a notion to sleep by my head. Since a cat cannot see in total darkness, he would get the position of my head by leeling. His paw would fall delicately on different parts — the nose, the forehead, the cheek — and when he had it all surveyed he would carefully he down. He would not use those ‘feelers’ of his, nor his nose, as a dog or other aninml would; he would use his hands.
My space is limited; but I hope I have shown that a cat has manipulative powers that are worth mentioning above any animal except the monkey or ape.
I do not suppose anyone ever yet came out in print and said a good word for a cat that he did not encounter criticism. On the other hand, any tribute to a dog, such as Senator Vest’s hifalutin verbiage, will be meekly swallowed and acceded to by lovers of the cat. Mr. Valentine, however, declares himself to be a lover of cats; he keeps them about the place. That is good; but what about a cat going up a tree and not having the ability or sense to come down? Is not this intended to be a slam at the cat? What has it to do with this subject under consideration, and why is it brought in?
Mr. Valentine quotes me as saying that cat lovers are ‘more’ refined than other people. I said that lovers of cats are ‘a most refined and discriminating class of people.’ I did not even intimate that they are the most refined and discriminating of persons.
However, I will say it now. The artist loves the cat because it is the most graceful and lithe and light-moving of animals. The scholar loves the cat because it is quiet and sensible and a good companion. Women love cats because they are sweet-scented and clean. The eat has no oil in its fur, so it does not gather dirt or harbor ill odors. It never rolls in filth as does a dog. It is always cleaning up, for which purpose its tongue is roughened for a comb. Even the smallest kitten has the instinct of good housekeeping. During the Middle Ages, when eats were new arrivals in Europe, the little lion-like animal was cherished and propagated by the nuns in Catholic convents. It was an animal that appealed to them because of its beauty and refinement.
To be a dog owner does not necessarily mean anything. There are the Bill Sikeses among dog owners. There are dog heaters as well as wife beaters. A mean man always has a mean dog, and often a cowardly one. To be an animal lover, however, is a different thing. I suppose the reason the cat has no defenders is because eats are so often the property of mild and gentle owners.
I, however, am just a man student and lover of the cat — and I have one that can whip any dog. Being a reader of Shakespeare, I take pleasure in his mention of the ’harmless necessary cat ’ and of the dog that ‘may stand by the fire and slink.’
CHARGES D. STEWART
Hartford, Wisconsin