September 1947
In This Issue
Explore the September 1947 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
This Month
Come Right In, Mr. Doyle
A Visit to Aunt Francesca
Spinners in the Sea
Felicity of Animal World
Tourist in France
The Books at Strawberry Hill
The Truly Feminine Mother
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Washington
Introduction to Whitehead
American Romance in the French Court
Second Growth
Report on the Germans
The Other Room
A Saintsbury Miscellany: Selections From His Essays and Scrap Books
Villainy Detected
The Age of Anxiety
The Steeper Cliff
Day of the Trumpet
Latin America
Correction
Packhorse Paradise
Freedom of Science in America
There is a present danger that American research may be stifled. In technical skill and inventiveness the United States has been pre-eminent; but for basic research in fundamental science Americans have leaned heavily on the work of German, Italian, Scandinavian, English, and other foreign scientists. Atom-splitting was discovered in Berlin; penicillin came from England; quantum mechanics owes its existence to the work of an Irish mathematician. Is our policy of atomic secrecy shutting our scientists off from the rest of the scientific world and from one another?
Moscow
The Stripers Are In
Unconditional Surrender
Autumn as a Language
In the Tower of London
English author and critic, SIR OSBERT SITWELL is now writing one of the most entertaining autobiographies of our time. In Left Hand, Right Hand! he told of his family heritage, and in lovely detail of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, which has been the family seat since the seventeenth century. In The Scarlet Tree he wrote of his parents and of the painfully inadequate Victorian education to which he and his sister Edith were subjected. Osbert graduated from Eton, and then his father, despite the boy’s protests, began to plan for his military career. “Knocking about with a sword,” his father assured him, “provides excellent exercise: and proves splendid training for afterlife.” After attending a crammer’s school and serving briefly in the Hussars, Osbert received his commission as Ensign in the Grenadier Guards.
Love Song to Eohippus
American Technology for Starved Lands
“Men with hoes have been supplanted by a man with a hose" says ROBERT PRICE RUSSELL,who is President of the Standard Oil Development Company. Under his leadership this large research organization developed new chemical processes which were indispensable in the war. Now, with the return to peace, his staff has devised hormone sprays with which the farmer can increase his yield and can control weeds, blight, and insect pests. These sprays increase yields of rice and coffee and ensure our peach and apple crops by keeping the fruit from dropping prematurely from the trees. By such technical aids as these, Americans can bring new fertility to the starved and wasted earth.
Strange New Uses of Sound
At the M.I.T. Commencement, General George C. Kenney warned his listeners that sound would be used as a weapon in future warfare. Scientists bent on more peaceful research tell us that sound leaves, some of them beyond our hearing, will kill bacteria, homogenize milk, speed chemical reactions, deled flaws in metals, mix paint, precipitate dust particles from smoke, and increase the yield from plant seeds. And at Columbia University ultrasonic waves have penetrated the skulls of animals to perform a knifeless surgery. Shall sound kill or cure?
A Night Wind
The Gentle, Perfect Knight
Look Out for the Ostriches
Pity Us All
America Discovers Bohemia
The Schools I Want and How to Get Them
The Soldanella Field
Friend Chekhov
