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The scene is in Athens, 1925, where interest in Americans has been stimulated by a U. S. proposal to buy the Parthenon and Acropolis complete and transport them overseas. "Truly a strange way," says Socrates, "of honouring the Athenians." Socrates has sunk somewhat from his onetime dignity. He stoops to puns and not a little hackneyed horseplay about U. S. pie-eating, the substitution of football for education, the divinities, Modern Science and Big Business, and their oracles, the Card Index and Henry Ford. But much of the dialogue, which Socrates conducts with prospective emigrants eager to hear what befell him on a lecture trip, digs deep and strikes-sparks: Economic causes of the Civil War, States Rights v. Federalism, traffic problems ("A youth is not granted the dignity of manhood until ... he first prove himself by parking a car" . . .), Progress ("whose will they declare it to be that there shall be made as great a number as possible of all objects that men make" . . .), Machinery ("more deadly than the Wooden Horse himself"), the wool trade ("the old fable of the wolf in sheep's clothing"). An effect at once precious nd provocative is obtained by reproducing the classic style. For any who have forgotten the classic style:
'"They have named a city after Plato*,' said Agathon.
" 'They will name a city after anybody,' I [Soarates] answered.
Conning the Cosmos
THE NATURE OF THE WORLD AND OP MAN—By Sixteen Members of the Faculty of the University of Chicago—University of Chicago Press ($4). Not all Chicago freshmen, only those of "superior intelligence," are permitted to take a survey course, designed to show man his position in the universe, which the 16 authors of this book give annually in formal lectures.
It is a fashion today to impart information metaphorically. Poetic astronomers will tell, you that if the earth were a grain of clay on a tennis court in New Orleans, the sun would be—a baseball in Chicago! These 16 Chicago scientists are not, however, of the poetic cut. They conceive it their job to state facts with direct dispatch.
Professor Forest Ray Moulton leads off by providing ground for his colleagues to stand on, locating the earth in the solar system, the solar system among the constellations and galaxies. Professor Rollin T. Chamberlin follows, to explain how the earth came to be where it is. (It was his father, T. C. Chamberlin, who with Dr. Moulton originated the theory that earth did not form from one of many whirling gas rings left in space as the sun shrank together, but originated separate from the sun as a core to which planetesimals ["star dust"] were slowly attracted.)
The appearance of life upon the earth is still mysterious to science. Professor Chamberlin can but describe the conditions that were favorable for it, leaving Biologist Horatio Hackett Newman to describe life itself. Beside its familiar phenomena of metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptability, Mr. Hackett, frankly mechanistic, sets down the point that, while undefined, life is no more of a "mystery" than electricity, light, energy, matter.