spent one summer as a carpenter, and as a worker in the wheat fields of Dakota, and another as a laborer on the Pacific Coast with a railway construction gang. To pay his way back to the college town from these western states would have taken all of the summer's earnings, so young Franck sent his wages back by postoffice order and returned by the best approved "hobo" methods. He made his first trip abroad at the end of his freshman year. He shipped from a village near Detroit as a caretaker of cattle. He had just three dollars and sixty cents in his pockets and with this he landed in Manchester and walked to London. He always made it a point to earn his way abroad. One of his most interesting memories is of the time when, on a tramp in central England, he found it necessary to live for a time chiefly on raw turnips. Photograph by Clinedinst. Edward Dana Durand, the new director of Census Bureau. It was in the fall after his graduation that the notion of attempting to make a journey around the world as a laborer and without money came to him. So, at the age of twenty-two he set out with a kodak and a few cents in money and made the journey around the world in sixteen months. He covered most of western Europe, Assyria and Palestine, Egypt and the Soudan, EDWARD D. DURAND Ceylon and India, Burmah and Siam, and finally China and Japan. In this worldgirdling pilgrimage he worked at more than a score of manual trades, ranging from pick and shovel man to circus clown. As he was curious to know just how an ordinary laborer would fare on such a trip, he posed everywhere as a common workman or sailor, and made no attempt to find work of a higher nature. About five thousand miles of the trip were made on foot, and every league by sea he traveled as a sailor at regular wages. Mr. Franck is modest about his performances, and it is only lately that he has begun to put upon paper any account of his travels. This magazine in a forthcoming issue, will contain the story of his experiences as a workman in Ceylon. Mr. Franck writes with a simplicity and directness of style that at once takes the reader with him. He proves to have had a keen eye for local color and characteristics and, perhaps the most valuable of all, saving sense of humor that carried him through many a trying situation. THE NEW CENSUS DIRECTOR WH "corking" good man to fill your place, it means he is paying you the best compliment possible. This is what Commissioner of Corporations Herbert Knox Smith said of his deputy, Edward Dana Durand, when the commissioner was told that President Taft had decided to place Mr. Durand at the head of the Census Bureau. In his office on the floor above Mr. Durand received the news with the pleasure of feeling that a part of his ambitions were about to be realized. He felt that he had at last been chosen to fill the most exacting office that could be assigned to a statistician.. Naturally Mr. Durand will encounter many difficulties in his new position, but it is expected that his confidence in himself will be of as great aid as it has been in the past. Different from Mr. North, his work is academic, Mr. Durand being possibly the best-trained statistician ever appointed to the position of Director of the Census Bureau. While he has held various positions as a teacher, Mr. Durand has not gained the distinction in academic work that he has outside. Nevertheless his success in government service has been speedy and gratifying. His most significant work in the public eye has been his book on the finances of New York City, his work with the Industrial Commission, and with the Bureau of Corporations. While serving as secretary of the Industrial Commission he edited a very creditable report of nineteen volumes. This proved that while Mr. Durand is not a good writer he is a good organizer. As Deputy Commissioner of Corporations he gained experience with the report on the Beef Trust, for which report he was chiefly responsible. He set his standard as a statistician, however, in his report on the Standard Oil Trust, which was issued from the same bureau. Mr. Durand was born in Romeo, Michigan, October 18, 1871, his father being Cyrus Y. Durand, a druggist. He is one of five children, all now living. He lived for about eleven years at Romeo, when the family moved to Huron, South Dakota, then a very new town, and "took up a claim" of land near there. Mr. Durand finished his high-school education at Huron, and then went for one year to Yankton College. From there he went to Oberlin College, Ohio, and graduated there in 1893. During the summer of 1893 Mr. Durand was stenographer to the Secretary of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. He then went to Cornell University and took a post-graduate course in political science, economics, and statistics. During this time he was assistant to Prof. J. W. Jenks, Secretary of the American Economic Association. He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Cornell, in 1896. After leaving Cornell Mr. Durand was employed for nearly two years in the New York State Library, at Albany, his special duty being to prepare material for the as sistance of members of the Legislature, including the publication of indices and digests of the laws passed annually by the various states of the country. At the beginning of 1898 Mr. Durand was appointed Assistant Professor of Po litical Economy and Finance at Stanford University, California, where he remained for a year and a half. When the Industrial Commission, of which he was secretary, was disbanded, he lectured on corporation and labor questions for a year at Harvard University. In 1903 he was appointed an expert on street railways in the Census Bureau, where he held the position of special examiner for about four months before being called to the Bureau of Corporations. He was married in 1903 to Mary Elizabeth Bennett, who had been a classmate of his at Oberlin College. They have two children, both boys. When he finishes his work with the Census he may have his other ambition gratified of being called back to academic work, possibly as president of some college. Mr. Durand becomes Director of the Census Bureau upon the eve of taking the Thirteenth Census of the United States. This is the government's largest statistical job, and since our census is more elaborate and detailed than that of any foreign country, it can be recognized what the new officer has to encounter. Some idea of the immensity of the work can be gained by a study of the act of Congress authorizing the taking of the census. While Mr. Durand is very affable in his manners there is nothing effusive about him. Of medium height and build, his forehead so high as to give the impression of being slightly bald, and wearing a small moustache, he is withal of striking appearance. During the last few days that he was Deputy Commissioner of Corporations he could be found busily engaged in putting the office in order for his successor. The days were warm and he worked without his coat, wearing most of the time a white shirt and a double-ply collar with a small black bow-tie. A SKETCH OF THE PERSONALITY AND METHODS OF LOUIS AGASSIZ FUERTES, THE BIRD ARTIST BY DAVID T. WELLS PROFESSION which takes a man on succeeding years from the heat of Florida to the chill of Alaska, out to the Texas desert, down to the Bahamas, out again to the Great Cañon and the heights of the Sierras down to Jamaica, up to Alberta, British Columbia, and back again to the Florida Keys, has something to recommend it to interest, if it is only its variety. When added to this variety is the fact that every one of these expeditions is a hunt, where the brain is the game bag and the trophy of the sport is finally mounted on a canvas to be a permanent addition to the knowledge of North American bird life, there is much more interest than attaches simply to stories of travel and adventure. In order to paint birds, the eye must be a camera, as clear and instantaneous in getting and holding the picture as the kind that folds for your pocket and which only needs the pressing of the button to make a picture gallery. A bird changes almost instantaneously with death, not only in form and posture, but in many cases in color also. The tints on the head, the legs, and even the colors of the eyes and beaks often change almost the moment that the heart stops pumping blood, and the man who paints pictures of dead birds may be exact and still be as far away from nature, as the astronomer who finds from observation that the sun goes around the earth. It was to train himself in this quick and active observation as a means to study, that Louis Agassiz Fuertes took up the painting of birds, but the means has been paramount to the end, and in the process of studying birds by painting them, Mr. Fuertes has made himself the foremost bird artist in the country. Besides he has Sketches made by Mr. Fuertes through field glasses of black-necked stilts. Chicks are hidden near. accomplished his original object and gained a very thorough knowledge of the birds of North America. Out of eight hundred species of North American birds, he has collected original notes concerning over six hundred, and there are only a very few genera and no orders which he has not studied from life and with sufficient care so that he would be able to reproduce again on canvas the appearance of the bird down to the smallest detail of color and posture. When a man is thirty-five years old and has been in the field of bird study and painting just ten years, that means pretty busy flitting from one point to another and almost indefatigable wielding of the brush. It is the small details of the appearance of the living bird that makes its reproduction in painting lifelike. As in the staging of a play, it is the little things that make all the difference between the impression of reality or the impression of woodenness. A picture which shows a ship sailing before a south wind with its flags and pennants flying toward the south does not seem right to the most ignorant landlubber, who could not, if he tried a week, find out why the picture was wrong. But a man who painted, for instance, the flight of a flock of wild ducks, could make just as glaring an error. A wild duck, like many other migratory birds, has the faculty when it flies, of keeping its head at a steady level, pointed at the spot for which it is making. Consequently, when its wings are down at the end of a stroke, its body is forced up higher than its head, and when its wings are up, at the beginning of a stroke, the body drops below the level of the head. There are probably not two in one hundred of the people who might look at a picture of a flock of ducks flying, that know this fact about the relative positions of their bodies and their heads, but, if the natural order should be reversed by the artist, nine out of ten of the persons who looked at the picture would probably know that there was something wrong with it, at least, that it did not look natural. That is one of the most evident characteristics of bird motion or posture, one whose absence would make an impression on any one. There are other characteristics much more slight, whose presence or absence from a picture means the whole difference between the valuable or the valueless, from a scientific standpoint. What good does it do a man to see the picture of a bird which he has never seen in the woods, if the absence of some little characteristic that is present in all members of that species gives him an entirely erroneous idea of the appearance of the creature? And there are hundreds of these little things that make the difference be Sketches of chimney swifts made from life. Mr. Fuertes is resourceful in his methods of approach ing birds to within sketching distance. |