Science: Expeditions: Sep. 20, 1926

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Expeditions are not what they used to be. Sail to the ice-studded shores of Greenland and you can still telephone your wife by wireless. Trek to the heart of Africa and you will not leave the automobile behind you; in fact, a Cape-to-Cairo airplane may pass overhead any day. Last month the British press announced the death of Charles St. John, 86, last white survivor of Missionary David Livingstone's seven-year expedition to find the watershed between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika, central Africa (1866-73). Concurrently there were reports of modern expeditions, coming and going:

MacMillan. Home from Labrador and Greenland, with plans for going back again to spend five years, came Explorer Donald B. MacMillan last week. He had been investigating ruins and legends problematically indicative of Norse settlements in America a thousand years ago. Maine coastal towns turned out to welcome their state's special hero. The Field Museum of Chicago rejoiced at the prospect of receiving a 1,500-pound walrus carcass and other specimens.

Eastman. At the age of 72, George ("Kodak") Eastman, of Rochester, N. Y., has been spending the summer photographing and shooting big game in Kenya, Tanganyika and the Belgian Congo. Near Nairobi natives chaired him on their shiny shoulders for slaying an eight-foot lion with two express bullets. Last fortnight came a letter from Explorer Carl E. Akeley, with the Eastman party and in charge of collections for the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, saying that the Kenya veld, once a hunter's paradise, is now stripped of fauna. "The unhappy remnant . . . now has its ear attuned to the rattle and bang of the motor car, which carries the alleged sportsmen over the veld in the hope of killing the last of a given species." At one water hole, Mr. Eastman photographed giraffes in the act of slaking their exaggerated throats but "couldn't bear the thought of being responsible for the death of one."

Putnam. Publisher George Palmer Putnam of Manhattan, with his small son David Binney Putnam; Art Young, archer; Carl Dunrud, cowboy; Dan Streeter, author; Capt. Bob Bartlett, Explorer Peary's onetime skipper; Knud Rasmussen, explorer; and naturalists from the American Museum of Natural History, have been cruising Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, off Greenland, in constant radio communication with the New York Times. Many a description of Arctic weather effects has been received, couched in Publisher Putnam's best editorial verbiage. Walrus, seals, narwhal and varied seafowl have fallen to the voyagers' trusty guns, a high moment coming last fortnight when the Putnams, father and son, and Dan Streeter touched off their rifles simultaneously into the bulk of a polar bear on a cake of pan ice. David Putnam, 13, veteran of William Beebe's last Galapagos cruise, had been spending days in the crow's-nest sighting for bear; it is unlikely that he will neglect to mention the episode in his projected treatize: David Goes to Greenland.