Far from worldly care is the pursuit of "ecological studies on the vanishing vertebrate fauna of the tropical rain forest remnant in East Africa, with a view to elucidating the origins of certain genera only known from the Uluguru and Usambara forests, and throwing light upon the dispersal of isolated, sylvicoline forms common to the Cameroon Mountains of the west and the Usambara Mountains of the East Coast." That is what Herpetologist Arthur Loveridge of Harvard University is going to do this year, and he will get something like $2,500 for doing it. Last week he and 37 other scholars and artists were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships.
Founded by Copperman Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga Hirsh, the Fellowships continue to afford security for a year of work and creation, but depression has forced the number of winners from 77 two years ago to 57 last year, 38 this year. Poet George Dillon (The Flowering Stone) won a Pulitzer Prize while still a Guggenheimer (TIME. May 9); his Fellowship is renewed this year. Another repeater is moody George Antheil, cacophonous composer. Other winners: Artists Emil Ganso. Louis Bouche and Miguel Covarrubias (who will paint in the Dutch East Indies); Sculptress Gwen Lux; Poets e. e. cummings, Louise Bogan; Biographer Matthew Josephson; Novelists Glenway Wescott. Leonard Ehrlich: Composer Paul Nordoff; Economists Henry Schultz and Charles Frederick Roos; historians, physicists, chemists, biologists.
The American Council of Learned Societies last week handed out $64,000 in grants and fellowships to 57 youngish U. S. scholars. Some things to be studied: Islamic architecture in Persia; the history of Chinese law; the Nootka language of Vancouver Island; Latin geomancy; Gullah; Roman pavements; Ibrahim ibn Yaqub's Commentary on Genesis; Widsith.