Word: surveyor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wisdom of Savages. Colonel Percy Fawcett first came to South America as a surveyor for the Bolivian government. Even then, at age 39, he was a stern, solitary man with childlike eyes and a mystical longing for primitive things. He found them: crocodiles everywhere, spiders that can catch birds, anacondas more than 60 ft. long that wail disturbingly in the jungle night, bloodsucking cockroaches, 2-in. biting ants, hordes of vampire bats, rivers full of stingrays, electric eels and shoals of tiny, man-eating piranha...
...Nigerian mission school. McPherson College took in six other Africans: James Craig, 25, a half-Scots Nigerian who wanted to be an agricultural missionary; Joseph Obi, 26, a onetime math teacher in a mission high school (who soon topped McPherson's honor roll); Isaac Grille, 21, a surveyor aiming for a degree in civil engineering; Daniel Onyema, 28, an accountant who wanted to be an electrical engineer; Emanuel Thompson, 24, a pharmacist studying' to be an orthopedic surgeon; Elijah Odo-kara, 21, a railway telegrapher who was taking a premedical course...
...Boschrot of Dutch explorers, the rat de bois of Louisiana's French trappers, didelphys in the classic zoology of Linnaeus and finally the modern opossum. This is the Indian name as recorded by Captain John Smith at Jamestown. But even Smith was wrong, said the King's surveyor in Carolina. The word was possum, preceded by a grunt, hence the opossum...
...century ago, British surveyors, measuring the towering Himalayas on the Nepal-Tibet border, found the world's highest mountain: 29,141 feet. Tibetan natives called it Chomolungma, meaning "Goddess Mother of Mountains," but the British named it after Sir George Everest, the crack surveyor who charted much of India. Last week Red Peking, which recently gobbled up Tibet, decreed that Everest (which no one has ever climbed to the summit) will hereafter be known by its ancient name, Chomolungma...
...Named for Sir George Everest (1790-1866), surveyor general of India. Original trigonometric surveys (1852) placed the height at 29,002 ft., a figure still widely accepted. Later computations (1905), still not accurate because of atmospheric refraction complications, place the height...