With the Faculty

WHEN TWO HARVARD MEN wished to found "a magazine of ideaistic writing" with the name Sibylline, they turned to a Dartmouth professor, Sidney Cox, not only for his advice about procedure and critical estimates but also for his own writing.

Quoting on page 1 Goethe's disparagement of cold reason and Samuel Butler's championship of extremes, the first issue (January-April, First Year, 1948, I) has appeared with some two dozen contributions and a position of honor given to Mr. Cox's essay of book length entitled Winking at the Sphinx, the Adventure ofForm and Flow, which with the help of the next three issues will be printed in its entirety. William A. Stockdale '42, a former honors man in English here, writing from Lawrence, Kansas, in a letter to the editors, calls the piece Sidney Cox's best work, but Robert C. MacLeod '46, a gifted undergraduate, though praising it in the January 26 issue of The Dartmouth, disagrees.

That Cambridge should lift its eyes to the Hanover hills and to Sidney Cox seems a logical elevation based on no mere local paradox of the ideaistic oblique, for since his earliest days in a variety of surroundings (Illinois, Columbia, Montana, Bread Loaf, Virginia, the New York State College for Teachers at Albany, the Cummington School in Massachusetts), he has focussed his chief energies on his own writings and on the writings of others.

In making criticism of courses in the college newspaper, Dartmouth students wrote in 1939, "Sidney Cox in one semester can teach more about writing, reading, thinking, and living than most men can in years." From then until now similar undergraduate estimates in The Dartmouth have emphasized Mr. Cox's "originality," "honesty," and "intensity."

His teaching did not dry up his own creativeness in writing: he is the author of The Teaching of English, Avowals andVentures, 1928; Robert Frost: Original'Ordinary Man', 1929; and Indirectionsfor Those Who Want to Write, 1947. He is also co-editor of two sets of Prose Preferences, 1926 and 1934, which have been widely used in American colleges.

Stanley Rice '45, son of Lloyd P. Rice, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth, and pupil of Ray Nash, Lecturer in Art, has designed the format of the new magazine and done the illustrations for Mr. Cox's essay.

Edited by Calvin Wilder, Mary Hill, and Wayne Phillips, Sibylline is published at 33 Phillips Street, Watertown, Mass., at 40 cents a copy and $1.50 a year.

ONE OF THE RAREST plants in the world, a cave moss that seems to shine in the dark, has been found in some abundance in a barn cellar in Groton, N. H., and has been photographed (see cut) by its own light by Charles J. Lyon, Professor of Botany at Dartmouth. Color slides of the find were shown in December at the annual meeting of the Sullivant Moss Society, an affiliated organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a paper by Professor Lyon was read.

The moss, although described as luminous, does not actually give off light but merely reflects it by means of an array of cells shaped like tiny automobile headlights. Its aibility to catch and reflect weak light in the dark, damp places where it grows is a remarkable phenomenon, however, and makes the moss a great rarity, even to professional botanists. A patch the size of that found in Groton is very unusual.

PROF. ROBERT M. BEAR, Chairman of the Department of Psychology, has won nationwide recognition for his work in remedial reading at the college level, and many a Dartmouth student can testify to the value of his work. For the last two years Professor Bear has been working as a member of a committee preparing tests to diagnose reading difficulties of high school and college students. The committee, which was subsidized by a grant from the Blue Hill Foundation, announces that one of the tests, chiefly the work of Professor Bear, will be published this month by Science Research Associates, Chicago.

Two OF DARTMOUTH'S English professors, Hewette E. Joyce and Arthur E. Jensen, will be on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College this summer. During the session from June 30 to August 14, Professor Joyce will teach courses on Milton and Victorian Poetry, while Professor Jensen will teach courses on Representative Continental Novels and The Age of Swift and Pope.

Robert Frost '96, Dartmouth's George Ticknor Fellow in the Humanities, will again be a special lecturer at Bread Loaf, fie will also take part in the annual Bread Loaf Writers' Conference from August 18 to September 1.

AN ALL-DARTMOUTH committee has been named by Hadley Cantril 28, president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (a division of the American Psychological Association), to plan the program for the Society's meeting in Boston next September. Ross Stagner, Professor of Psychology at Dartmouth, is chairman of the committee. He will be assisted by Prof. Irving E. Bender of Dartmouth and Charles E. Osgood '39, now Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of. Connecticut.

PAUL FISHER, Assistant Professor of Economics, has been appointed Participating Editor in the Conference on Training of Law Students in Labor Relations. The conference, conducted by the Association of American Law Schools and supported by the Carnegie Foundation, is cooperating in the preparation of a casebook and a textbook on labor law. Professor Fisher is one of the few teachers outside the law school faculties invited to participate in the treatment of Comparative Labor Law.

In addition to his College courses in economics, Professor Fisher is giving a new course at the Tuck School during the second semester. Entitled "Labor and Social Security Legislation," it deals with some of the material taught at Tuck School by the late Prof. Herman Feldman.

SEVENTEEN MEMBERS of the Dartmouth faculty are on sabbatical leave for the present semester which opened February 16. These professors are: Hugh S. Morrison '26, Art; James P. Poole, Botany; Andrew J. Scarlett '10, chemistry; Herbert F. West '22, comparative literature; Clyde E. Dankert, economics; Francis L. Childs '06 and Edmund H. Booth '18, English; Ellsworth D. Elston, geology; Robert K. Carr '29, government; Arthur H. Basye and W. Randall Waterman, history; Chauncey N. Allen '24, psychology; George E. Diller and Leon Verriest, French; William D. Maynard '11, Romance languages; Rees H. Bowen, sociology; and Carl D. England, speech.

THE NATIONAL DEFENSE CONFERENCE held at Norwich University on February 12 was attended by four faculty representatives from Dartmouth: Dr. Rolf C. Syvertsen '18, Dean of the Medical School, Richard H. Goddard '20, Professor of Astronomy; Captain Roger E. Nelson, USN, Professor of Naval Science; and Commander Charles O. Cook Jr., USN, Associate Professor of Naval Science. At the conference, attended by high ranking Army and Navy officers and featuring demonstrations by the Norwich ROTC mountain and winter warfare unit, Prof. John H. Wolfenden of Dartmouth, formerly of Oxford, received the Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm from the U. S. Government for his scientific services during the war.

PROFESSOR SIDNEY H. COX, whose essay "Winking at the Sphinx" is featured in the first issue of a new literary quarterly, "Sibylline/'

A RARE FIND by Prof. Charles J. Lyon of the Botany Department is this luminous moss which he photographed by its own light. The above patch, largest yet found, is in a Groton, N. H., barn cellar.