Science: East Gone West

(See front cover)

Three hundred cheerful, sociable, well-dressed Chicagoans of the class which, well-off mentally as well as financially, is out to make Chicago a great cultural centre as well as the country's biggest railroad junction, assembled last week in a new million-dollar building on the citified "campus" of the University of Chicago. Henry and Stanley Field, Rufus Cutler Dawes, Thomas Elliott Donnelley, Harold Higgins Swift, et ul., mingled with a learned collection of archaeologists and other scientists. Neatly bespatted, with waxed mustache almost as shiny as his horn-rimmed spectacles, the Egyptian Minister to the U. S., Sesostris Sidarouss Pasha was there, beaming at one & all, and especially at the rosy little man with fluffy white hair and bright blue eyes whose day and party it was, Dr. James Henry Breasted, foremost Egyptologist of the U. S.

The new building is John Davison Rockefeller Jr.'s latest munificence to the University of Chicago. The Oriental Institute is its name and behind it lies an endowment of between twelve and 14 million dollars, the entire income of which is at Dr. Breasted's disposal to pursue and make permanent his life work: the study of the birth of civilization in the eastern end of the Mediterranean Basin.

Happy, beaming Dr. Breasted, congratulated on all sides as the party and speech-making got under way, beamed more brightly when the Rockefeller Foundation's Dr. Raymond Elaine Fosdick paid him this compliment: "If there had been no Breasted there would have been no Oriental Institute, and without an Oriental Institute the story of the rise of man would today be far less vivid and far less complete."

In his own speech Dr. Breasted interrupted an account of the Institute's work to take a rap at "old school theologians" whom he blamed for claiming that man's character was produced by divine inspiration. Bright eyes flashing earnestly behind his spectacles, he declared: "It was the outgrowth of man's own social experience. It sprang out of his own soul, and no outworn theological doctrine of inspiration, no conception of a spotlight of Divine Providence shining exclusively on Palestine, shall despoil man of this crowning glory of his life on earth, the discovery of Character."