Science: Holiday

Between Christmas and New Year, when students have gone home for their midwinter frolic, university scientists are accustomed to put down their textbooks and laboratory tools and go on a busman's holiday. Soberly they attend dozens of conventions, read thousands of papers, talk shop, elect officers, award prizes, take stock of a year's progress, get their names in the newspapers, mingle with a sprinkling of industrial colleagues. Last week geologists convened in Cincinnati, geographers in Syracuse, mathematicians in Durham, N. C., philosophers in Cambridge, astronomers in Frederick, Md. (see p. 52),...