Word: prior
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...saying, last week cowboyish Governor Roy E. Ayers endeared himself to Montana's rural and Roman Catholic voters-but not to big-city lawyers, dude ranchers, hotelmen-by unexpectedly vetoing a 30-day-residence divorce law passed the week prior by his legislature (TIME...
...takes a mild, sporadic revenge on the plant-eating animal kingdom by arranging for certain plants to trap, devour and digest insects, worms, larvae, tiny fish, Crustacea-even birds, mice, frogs. Last week Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History published a booklet, Carnivorous Plants, by Botanist Sophia Prior, describing these plants and their predatory procedures...
...gaping clam shell. From the edges of the leaf two rows of slender spikes project inward like teeth. Two or three sensitive hairs serve as a trigger mechanism. When an insect touches these, the lobes snap together, the spikes meshing to prevent escape. Then the leaf, says Miss Prior, "is converted into a virtual stomach and the glands on the upper surface . . . come into action until all the soft parts of the prey are liquefied...
Such actual plant traps as these have probably inspired the tall tales told by imaginative travelers about others much bigger and much more dreadful. Miss Prior, who dismisses them all as fables, quotes a Dr. Carl Liche who claimed to have seen a woman sacrificed, with horrid ceremony, to a "man-eating tree" in Madagascar. A sojourner in Brazil said he saw a tree which attracted monkeys by means of a peculiar odor, hemmed them in a prison of leaves, dropped their bare bones after three days. Centuries ago a very tall tale popped up about a gigantic Death Flower...
...fair, on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. Few minutes later, to the jealous joy of Florida, Franklin Roosevelt radioed his national benediction from Key West (see p. 13). Other orators of State and church completed the inaugural, but the sublimest signal of all had been furnished the night prior at 10:30 p. m. by the sun itself, then riding at meridian over India. Its noonday rays impinged upon a photoelectric cell in Bombay, closing electric circuits by radio to start the carillon in the Tower of the Sun (400 ft., the fair's tallest). The carillon thereupon...