gave a whoop. "Oh, poor dear, and did you think we were shooting all that for a dollar or so's worth of pennies? Lord, no, those were the chips; we were shooting for dates, old thing." Something happened that had never happened in Jim Barnabas's life before; his jaw fell. "Dates?" "Why, surely. And here that fish-egg has gone and got my whole evening tonight, and I suppose that means till two or three G. M.; they never do go to bed on this damned boat." Jim looked at his finger-nails. He would have given millions for his lost mask again. "I don't understand. Dates? With whom?" "Oh, that lizard. He's been doing nothing all trip but try and date me up, and at last, to-day, my sporting blood got the better of me. It would have been a shriek though, all the same. If he cleaned me, I was dated for the evening. If I cleaned him, he had to go and date up Phoebe Ingle-you know her, the fat one, poor romantic thing-instead. Shriek? I'd have given a year of my life But what's the use? I'm the goat. He won." "He won-what?" Jim still studied his finger-nails. "What-what does a 'date'-mean?" Hara laughed melodiously. "What mightn't it mean, on this deck up here in the dark of the moon, with that Arabian?" "Gilt Edge Jim" was nearing eighty, but there was still heat in him. It ran from his ankles to his crown. Victorian that he was to the meat in his bones, he wheeled to stare at her with fierce big eyes. "You shan't do it, Hara! Hara, Hara! You won't do it! You won't keep that date to-night!" "Won't?" Hara lost her smile. She canted her head a little, pointed her chin, puckered her brows. "Do you mean I should-what was your old word for it, Gilt Edge?-welsh my bet? Why, Jim, I had supposed we Barnabases-" But then, perceiving the disaster, she was swept by swift remorse. She grew gay, one arm around his shoulders, fingers patting. "Dear me, don't look like that. Silly, what did you think? Don't you suppose I'm husky enough to take care of myself with that sofa-crocodile? Honeylamb, I studied wrestling in college. I know the breaks to all the holds." She kissed him behind an ear and ran away, but turned in the middle of the wind where it swept strongly around the deckhouse to make a pretty mouth at him. "If that's what you're worrying about, Jimmy, don't worry about that." Barnabas hung his weight on the rail, his eyes heavy on the sea. "This is all new to me," he had told Petts, the bar-steward. Now he knew something he had not known when he uttered those words so lightly. He knew that they were true. There's no fool indeed like an old one, and he was an old one, suddenly. Something prodded at his brain: "Why don't you laugh? You pioneer, you. You rider of risk, you runner of chance, lover of freedom, child of adventure, breaker of trails. . . . They talk a language again that you know, these golden children. Yes, but you said yourself they do. See the joke, old man?” Where the water met the sky to the north a shape appeared, a lone rock washed by waves, hardly more than phantom in the thickening light toward sundown. Barnabas gazed at it with a hollowness at the pit of him, fascinated, dismayed. The landfall of a continent he had never known. It was more. It was like the beginning of a frontier he had never dreamed of. The frontier Jim Barnabas had been dreaming of was dead half a century ago. Age struck the little gambler and he shut his eyes. With his eyes shut he hunted and he found another picture. He saw two windows full of the leaves of planted maples and glimpses of a hot, bright, dreary western street. Flies buzzed up and down the screens, just as they had buzzed at this hour yesterday, just as they would buzz at the same hour to-morrow. Between the windows he saw a mirror, supported by bottles of hair-tonic and flanked by shaving-mugs illuminated with the names of friends. In the mirror he saw a man with pride in his heart and courage on his face, lying swathed in a barber's chair. The dark head of Louie, Ogden's finest tonsorial artist, hovered. "Razor to your satisfaction this morning, Colonel Barnabas?" A wave of nostalgia passed over him, homesickness for that desert of bitter eclipse where he might have stayed if he had had the sense, and died, and never known that the frontier had crept on ahead of him into new wild lands. . . . Hara came to get him to dress for dinner. What a marvel she was, though, really. What a pity Ed and Newt could not have seen her, walking so in the wind of space. "Why, Gilt Edge, you lazy, still here? Still-" A quick cloud of concern. "Not still worrying about that silly date, don't tell me. See here, do you really want me to duck it?" "No!" He faced her. For half a wink he was standing on his magic heels again. "But why ask me, Hara? You're the Barnabas now; you're the House now; not me. The cards are yours now. You've got to deal." She started to throw an arm around his shoulders. But then, just why she couldn't have said (she had never noticed till now how little and old he was), she laid it around them gently. "Grandfather, you're a dear." Creative Co-Ordination A MESSAGE FROM PHYSICAL SCIENCE BY MICHAEL PUPIN Author of "From Immigrant to Inventor," "The New Reformation," etc. I HAVE a story to tell you and I hope that it will deliver to you a message from physical science which was delivered to me in the course of the last fifty years. Fifty-two years ago I found my first employment in a factory in New York. That was my first opportunity to learn how to manage a boiler-room and its engine, and I gladly took it. It gave me the first lesson which taught me that the fire under the boiler supplies the driving power to every machine in the factory in which I was employed. To an untutored Serbian immigrant who had never seen such things in his native village, that was an awe-inspiring knowledge, and it thrilled me. It stirred my emotions and my imagination, and I almost became a fire-worshipper. A little later I had a brief experience in a foundry, where castings were made by pouring white-hot metal into suitable moulds in the chilling sand. I shall never forget the dazzling brilliancy of the whitehot metal made fluid by the breath of the roaring furnace flames, and the beautiful castings into which the white-hot metal was chilled and tempered. This was the second thrill which aroused my interest in the phenomena of heat. When a youth is really thrilled by the beauty of a physical phenomenon he has many questions to ask. Many a youth in the land will ask you to-day: What is electricity? His thrilling experience with a radio-receiving set suggests the question. My thrilling experience in the boiler-room and in the foundry made me ask the questions: What is heat? How does it supply the driving power? How does it shape and temper the metal castings? Questions of this kind are the beginning of a true interest in science, and such an interest permits no delay of the search for an answer. I searched for an answer in a book which was very popular in those days; it was Tyndall's famous book entitled: "Heat as a Mode of Motion." It told me a wonderful story of the phenomena of heat. Tyndall's story was, I thought, a scientific poem in prose. II Now here is a bit of Tyndall's poetic story; it says: A hot and radiant body like the familiar flame under the boiler, and CO- the white-hot metal in the foundry, are gine? The piston receives the chaotic the seat of violent and erratic molecular pulses of the infinitely small but inmotions. The higher the temperature finitely numerous projectiles, the steam the more intense is this erratic motion. molecules, and averages them up, and Each one of the billions and billions of thus co-ordinates their propelling force, tiny molecules, like frantic individuals in the pressure of steam. The piston coa panicky crowd, is moving with aimless ordinates the action of a chaotic mob and hurry, apparently following its own sweet transforms a part of the chaotic energy of will, and, therefore, colliding with its steam into an orderly motion of the piston neighbors incessantly. and of all the machinery connected with it. The piston is a co-ordinator. Just as the word "temperature" reminded me that heat is a molecular chaos, so the word "co-ordinator" reminded me that this chaos can be transformed into orderly motion, which the hand of man can manage and derive useful service. This is the simplest illustration of the service rendered by the co-ordination of the caloric chaos. But you will say: "This is indeed an ugly chaos, and what thrill was there in the contemplation of such a chaos which made you think that Tyndall's description of it was poetry in prose?" Yes, it is a chaos, but it is a chaos in the microcosm, in the invisible world of atoms and molecules of the hot body. From this chaos there rose like a vision a new meaning of an old idea, the idea of temperature. Tyndall revealed it to me when he showed that temperature stands for the average energy of the chaotic molecular motion, which is the caloric energy of the body. The motion of heat from points of higher to points of lower temperature, a wellknown physical fact, appeared to me then in a new light. I described it as a motion of caloric energy from points of higher to points of lower energy levels similar to the motion of material bodies from points of higher to points of lower gravitational energy levels. My favorite question: How does the fire under the boiler supply the driving power to every machine in the factory in which I was employed? was then easily answered as follows: Just as the mountain stream in its downward flow can drive a mill, so can heat, moving from the higher temperature level of the boiler to the lower temperature level of the condenser, drive the piston of the steam-engine and the machinery connected with it. But, guided by Tyndall, I did not press this analogy too far. One fundamental difference was obvious. There is no chaotic energy distribution among the particles of the water which drives the mill; each drop of the busy stream moves in orderly fashion alongside of its neighboring drops, and all of them, like an army of peaceful and welldrilled toilers, push in unison against the rotating wheel. This is a picture of a perfectly co-ordinated effort. But how about the chaotic push of the molecules of steam in the cylinder of a steam-en III THIS was the revelation which Tyndall's book disclosed to me at the time when I was preparing for college. This preparation told me of a legend of ancient Greece, which says that in the beginning this world was a chaos, and that the Olympian gods had transformed it into a cosmos, a universe of simple law and beautiful order. I saw in the co-ordinating action of the piston a striking illustration of the creative process which the poetic soul of ancient Greece had reserved for the Olympian gods. "The prosy modern piston," said I, "imitates the Olympian deities; it transforms a chaos into a cosmos." The poets of ancient Greece would have credited the inventor of the steam-engine with the possession of a secret art which he had stolen from the Olympian gods, just as Prometheus had stolen the celestial fire from Helios. Yes, the modern inventor may be said to have stolen a secret from golden Helios, the sungod. His steam-engine imitates the operation of the central star of our planetary system. Where the ancient worshippers of Helios saw a resplendent sun-god radiating his breath of life to the terrestrial waters, the modern inventor saw a celestial fire, and imitated its action upon the terrestrial waters by a fire under the boiler. Where the ancients saw the blessings of the sun-god manifesting themselves by the rising vapors lifted on high from rivers, lakes, and oceans, and form ing clouds which, journeying to higher elevations of the terrestrial globe, carry the waters to the thirsty continents, there the modern inventor saw the motion of steam from the boiler to the condenser and on its journey driving the piston. The piston reacts against the chaotic pulses of steam just as the weight of the cloud-forming vapors reacts against the chaotic pulses of solar radiation. But neither the poets of ancient Greece nor the modern inventor detected in this cyclic motion of water a fundamental process of nature. They did not recognize in the motion of the gigantic water masses a continuous transformation of the chaotic radiant energy of our central star into a huge storage of gravitational energy associated with the elevated water masses. This energy is just as coordinated and available as the energy of the moving machinery which puzzled me fifty years ago. It descends to lower levels when the water masses start their return journey to the oceans, and it is ready then to work for the miller on the mountainside, or for the husbandman, irrigating his thirsty fields in the blessed valley. This beautiful cyclic process is a transformation of a solar chaos into a terrestrial cosmos by the co-ordinating forces which reside in the primordial granules of water, in its atoms and molecules, and it was revealed by modern science. Tyndall revealed it to me, and this revelation enabled me to answer the questions: What is heat? and, How does the fire under the boiler supply the driving power to every machine in the factory in which I was employed? IV DID it enable me also to answer the other question, namely: What is the mission of heat in the foundry where castings are made by pouring white-hot metal into a tempering mould in the chilling sand? Let the familiar snowflakes answer this question. They are the beautiful crystalline castings of the fluid masses raised on high by the solar furnace and tempered by the chilling action of the surrounding space. The transformation of a tiny bit of shapeless water vapor into the crystalline beauty of a snowflake is a transformation of a chaos into a cosmos. The chaos is the chaotic motion of the vapor mole cules, the beautiful cosmos in the snowflake structure appears when the chilling process of the environment reduces this chaotic motion, and thus permits the atomic and molecular forces to co-ordinate the vapor molecules and assign to each its proper place in the stable structure of the snowflake crystals. This is a process of co-ordination in which the internal forces act as co-ordinators; it is their action which makes the snowflake crystals rise from the shapeless water vapor just as beautiful Aphrodite rose from the shapeless foam of a turbulent sea. I never watch the graceful descent of the tiny snowflakes without recalling to memory those puzzling questions which many years ago I formulated in the boilerroom and in the foundry and, guided by Tyndall's poetic story, found this simple answer: Transformation of the caloric chaos into a cosmos of motion and of stable structures. This creative process is exhibited beautifully in the evolution of matter in the galaxy of the blazing stars. There we still see an infant universe in its cradle. Many of the visible stars are white-hot bodies; some of them are in a state of a tenuous gas. This is the state of stellar infancy. The spectrum of these stellar infants tells us that at the lofty temperature levels of the hottest stars the lightest atoms only can exist; so violent are the incessant molecular collisions in their everlasting chaos. But from this lofty temperature level each of them radiates its almost inexhaustible energy of caloric chaos at a lavish rate into the chilliness of the interstellar space. Like the vapor, coalescing into beautiful snowflakes or the white-hot metal moulded by the chilling sand into tempered castings, these tenuous stars are coalescing and some time, but God only knows when and where, they will form stable structures; call them celestial snowflakes, or celestial castings, whatever suits your fancy better. V OUR terrestrial globe is a celestial casting, and he who like myself learned the language of the foundry in his early youth, will ask the human question: what is the mission of this celestial casting, this old celestial wanderer through the mighty stream of chaotic solar radiation? Is it only to receive its final tempering from the solar furnace which gave it its birth, and to smooth out its jagged surface by the erosive action of the waters which solar radiation carries in ceaseless succession of cycles from the oceans to the higher continental elevations? The answer to this human question is obvious; it is this: The highest mission of this celestial casting, which we call affectionately "our mother earth," is to provide a congenial home for a new universe, "the universe of organic life." The story which the blazing activity in the visible galaxy of stars tells us says nothing about the universe of living organisms. But endeavoring to express the unknown in terms of the known we describe, as well as we can, the activity of the organic universe in terms of the language which we have learned from the more familiar inorganic universe. The fundamental concepts of this language are those of motion of the primordial granules of electricity and of matter, and of the forces which are the inseparable attributes of these granules. Dynamics of inorganic matter is the story which has been written in terms of the vocabulary of this language. Hence we paint the picture of the organic universe in colors which we borrow from our picture of the more familiar inorganic world. It is, therefore, not surprising that this tentative picture often suggests a mechanistic view of the living universe. But is that view of organic life the final verdict of science from which there is no appeal or is it only a temporary hypothesis? It is an interesting and significant fact that many great students of the inorganic universe do not accept the mechanistic view. I venture to make a few elementary and, perhaps, not superfluous comments upon this complex theme, fully aware that I am trespassing upon a territory in which I am an unknown stranger. VI He who in his early youth was thrilled by the phenomena of heat in the boilerroom and in the foundry and, guided by Tyndall, found in the inorganic universe a continuous transformation of a microcosmic chaos into a visible cosmos will naturally look for a similar transformation in the universe of organic life. Such transformations are certainly there, and they give a definite meaning to the adjective "organic." They are, in my humble opinion, the most general and characteristic attributes of the activities in the organic universe. Just as electricity is granular, consisting of electrons and protons; and inorganic matter is granular, consisting of atoms and molecules; so are also the caloric, the radiant, and the chemical energies granular since they manifest themselves through activities of the granules of electricity and matter. In this sense life from a physical point of view is also granular in structure, consisting of the tiny granules of living matter; its physical activity is also granular, being made up of the activity of the granules of living matter. The organic universe, being a structure made up of countless tiny units each of them endowed with individual power of action, will be a chaos just like the inorganic universe unless these units are guided by an inherent co-ordination. The organic just like the inorganic universe has its microcosm, the fundamental units of which are not electrons and protons, atoms and molecules, but tiny units of life; call them, for want of a better name, the molecules of life, and by that I mean the microscopic and ultramicroscopic units of life in the living cell. Each of them feeds, grows, and multiplies, and that means a transformation of chemical and caloric energy delivered to it, and obviously utilized for co-ordinated creative work, which is as definite as the constructive processes in an industrial plant. The similarity of this microcosmic performance to the procedure of supplying food, raw material, and co-ordinated power to the trained workers in a factory is certainly very suggestive. Chemical activities, when unguided by co-ordinating forces, are just as chaotic as caloric activity. Since these two activities supply the energy and the materials for coordinated constructive efforts to each molecule of life, that energy in its journey to this busy worker must, therefore, meet somewhere during this journey the reaction of a co-ordinator, just as the chaotic heat energy, in its journey from the boiler to the condenser, meets the reaction of the co-ordinating piston. Although we do not know the structure of this co-ordina |