Word: botanist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hunting son of a prosperous Shrewsbury doctor, the young man proved a dud at school and at Cambridge. At 22, he seemed destined for what Victorians frankly called "a living" in the church. Only a chance friendship with the Rev. Professor J. S. Henslow of Cambridge, a botanist, led to Darwin's recommendation as the Beagle's naturalist. Chance, plus a certain amount of charm, determined that he hit it off immediately with the Beagle's hot-tempered Captain FitzRoy, a Tory traditionalist with a fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis...
...place is a disaster area," says University of Montana Botanist Clarence C. Gordon, who was called in with other scientists by the National Air Pollution Control Administration to study the problem. The scientists found that sulphur dioxide in the fumes kills the tips of some trees and causes others to lose their needles or grow buds in unsightly clusters...
Almost as worrisome to conservationists were the chemicals dropped from planes and boats to disperse and dissolve the slick. Botanist Michael Neushul of the University of California recalled the 1957 breakup off Baja California of the tanker Tampico, which dumped 59,000 barrels of diesel oil into the Pacific and "utterly impoverished animal life" in the area for five years. In 1967, when the Torrey Canyon-carrying crude-spilled 100,000 tons into the English Channel, 90% of the animal loss was caused by detergents used to clean up the oil. As for Santa Barbara, Neushul figures that such grazing...
They laughed when an Illinois farmer reported that he had significantly increased his crop yield by serenading corn plants with Rhapsody in Blue. And few believed Indian Botanist T.C.N. Singh when he said that a shrill electric bell speeded the germination of seeds and that classical Indian violin and flute selections promoted crop growth. Or the Australian fruit farmer who swore that he had raised bigger and better bananas by bombarding them with a loud, constant bass note broad cast from loudspeakers set up among the trees...
...academic recognition of Berkeley as a finer all-round school on the graduate level than Harvard. Massachusetts now pays full professors an average $17,300-and President John Lederle is an aggressive raider of private-university faculties. Among his recent catches: University of Chicago Mathematician Marshall Harvey Stone, N.Y.U. Botanist Oswald Tippo, Yale Physicist Robert Gluckstern and lohns Hopkins Astrophysicist John D. Strong, who brought $1,000,000 in equipment with him. "We're not trying to create an Ivy League college or a Big Ten here," says Lederle. "We'll take the best of both...