Word: naturalist
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Died. Maximilian Agassiz, 77, swank grandson of the famed 19th-Century naturalist Louis Agassiz and president of both Newport's Reading Room (stag) and Clambake Club (coed); after a ten-year illness; in Newport, R.I. His father, Harvard Savant Alexander Agassiz, helped develop Calumet & Hecla copper mines, left him a fortune out of which he paid many a newsboy's way through college...
Only in the last 20 years have scientists really become termite-conscious. Termites were almost unknown in 1781, when the Royal Society decided that Naturalist Smeathman was heat-crazy when he reported that tropical termites build nests ten to 35 ft. high (sometimes miscalled ant-hills), the largest structures built by any animal except man. In the U.S. the work of termites was long mistaken for that of fungi and dry-rot which usually follow their riddlings...
...insects, as Naturalist Julian Huxley explains, microscopic air tubes carry oxygen "directly to and from the tissues instead of using dual mechanisms of lungs and blood stream. Laws of gaseous diffusion are such that [this system] is extremely efficient for very small animals, but becomes rapidly less efficient with increase of size, until it ceases to be of use at a bulk below that of a house mouse. [So] no insect has become moderately large by vertebrate standards or moderately intelligent." If the termite had a proper trachea, man might never have appeared on earth...
Died. Dr. Raymond Lee Ditmars, 65, best-known snake man in the U.S.; in Manhattan. Successful popularizer of herpetology, entomology (Snakes of the World, Thrills of a Naturalist's Quest), he was Curator of Reptiles at The Bronx Zoo from 1899 until last January. Died. Joseph Francis Jiranek, 69 ("Joe Jackson, the tramp cyclist"); of a heart attack; in the wings of Manhattan's Roxy Theater...
Died. George Shiras, III, 83, naturalist, "father of wild life photography"; in Marquette, Mich. He discovered a successful method of taking flashlight pictures of wild animals, for more than half a century photographed them in wildernesses from Hudson Bay to Mexico...