Word: botanists
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Peruvians would often snicker and guffaw as they watched Goodspeed scramble after odd plants. They thought he was gathering aphrodisiacs. But what really interested the botanist was the fact that many of the earth's 60 species of Nicotiana grow among the Andes. There, scientists believe, the Nicotiana tabacum now commonly smoked developed long ago through natural hybridization. Federal tobaccomen think that wild, tough plants from their native mountains can perhaps be crossed with the highly bred, less vigorous tobacco strains now cultivated in the U.S., to increase their resistance to fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects which yearly cost growers...
...Nicotine is formed entirely in tobacco roots, not at all in the leaves. Evidence, presented by Botanist Ray Fields Dawson of the University of Missouri: tomato leaves grafted on tobacco plants are smokable, but tobacco leaves grafted on tomato vines have no nicotine flavor...
...there evergreens in the South, oaks in the North? Botanist William Spinner Cooper of the University of Minnesota studied fossil tree pollens in peat, concluded that "in America the climate following the glacial epoch was warm and dry, with a return to a cooler moister climate during the last few thousand years." Thus the cone-bearing evergreens of the Southern U.S. are relics of the glacial invasion (which halted at the Ohio River), and the North's oaks and other hardwoods are relics of the warm postglacial period...
AWAKE DEBORAH-Eden Phillpotts-Macmillan ($2.50). Long golden hair woven into a Dartmoor heath lark's nest is the first clue to murder that stirs an English botanist out of his dignified ease and sadly perplexes Scotland Yard. Lengthy, but impressive story in the grand English tradition...
...America to make his fortune during the Napoleonic wars, Redon was born in 1840 just after his parents landed in Bordeaux. A sickly child in a fairly well-to-do family, he was allowed to dawdle unsuccessfully at his early school studies, got his real education from an eccentric botanist who whetted his appetite for writers like Flaubert, Baudelaire, Poe. In Paris he took up architecture, then sculpture, failed at both. A moody young man, he was drafted in the Franco-Prussian War, complained that while his exuberant companions in arms sang and laughed, he himself just got very tired...