THE FACULTY

PRESIDENT DICKEY announced last month that the Trustees have elected John Barker Stearns '16 to be Daniel Webster Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Dartmouth College, filling a chair previously held by the late Prof. William Stuart Messer. The endowed chair was created in 1883 through gifts from B. P. Cheney of Boston, the Classes of 1856 and 1860, and other individuals, to honor Dartmouth's most illustrious graduate.

Professor Stearns took his master's and doctoral degrees at Princeton, and taught Greek and Latin at Alfred University, Princeton and Yale before returning to Dartmouth in 1927 as assistant professor. He was made a full professor in 1931. He is associate editor of Classical Journal and has written many articles on classical art and archaeology. The learned societies of which he is a member include the Classical League, the American Philological Association, and the Classical Association of New England.

Professor Stearns won the Croix de Guerre from the French government for his service in World War I. He was in Germany in 1939 to attend an international archaeological congress when World War II broke out. He fled to Budapest and returned to the United States instead of going to Athens where he was scheduled to lecture at the American School of Classical Studies. In Hanover civic affairs, he has served on the School Board and Town Planning Board, and is presently the Town Moderator.

PROFESSOR Henry W. Ehrmann, University of Colorado political scientist, will join the Dartmouth College faculty as Professor of Government next fall. Professor Ehrmann's work in comparative politics, international relations and jurisprudence has centered on European interest groups and political parties. He is the author of two books, Organized Business inFrance (1958), and French Laborfrom Popular Front to Liberation (1947). He has contributed some seventy articles and reviews to professional journals in this country and abroad.

Professor Ehrmann was born in Germany in 1908. After studying law at Berlin and Freiburg, he worked in Amsterdam and Paris as an associate of the International Institute of Social History. In 1940, upon coming to the United States, he joined the New School of Social Research in New York. From 1943 to 1947 he served as a consultant to the Office of War Information and the War Department. He has been a member of the Political Science Department at the University of Colorado since 1947.

Professor Ehrmann was selected by UNESCO to be the editor and co-au-thor of The Teaching of the Social Sciences in the United States (1954). He also served as rapporteur for a conference of the International Political Science Association and edited its ensuing volume, Interest Groups on Four Continents (1958). Professor Ehrmann has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California and at several European institutions. He has held awards from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. He has also served on the editorial board of the American PoliticalScience Review and on the Fulbright Awards Selection Committee.

PROF. Joseph L. McDonald, Dean Emeritus of the College, is temporarily returning to academic duties this term to serve as Acting Director of the Great Issues Course. He has replaced Prof. Hugh Morrison '26 who has completed his term as director and has returned to teaching duties in the Art Department. Dean McDonald retired in 1959 after 36 years as teacher and dean. He was Professor of Economics and taught that subject in Tuck School as well as in the College before becoming Dean of the College in 1952.

ASSISTANT Professor of Geology Robert C. Reynolds Jr. will explore a hazy chapter in the earth's history with a new technique for analyzing the chemical composition of ancient rock. The recipient of a two-year grant of $32,700 from the National Science Foundation, Professor Reynolds will investigate the salinity of seas in the Pre-Cambrian period, one to two billion years ago. Most lower animal evolution occurred during this period, yet the conditions under which it developed are shrouded in mystery. The first advanced marine creatures emerged from certain forms of Pre-Cambrian marine life. The sea environment is thought to be the most important single element in this evolutionary change.

Professor Reynolds' new method measures the exact amount of an element, boron, in rocks. It has been identified as the most sensitive of marine conditions. Professor Reynolds hopes that his study will help explain a geological phenomenon - why PerCambrian rock contains only a few fossils of sponges and algae, while nearly every form of animal life except the vertebrates suddenly appear in Cambrian rock from the early Paleozoic era some 550 million years ago. He will attempt to determine whether ancient seas contained more boron, which may have been associated with chlorine to form boric and hydrochloric acids, and hence were more acid than those of later eras. He will thus test the theory that extreme acidity and lack of alkalines such as calcium and magnesium prevented animal life from forming the shells which otherwise would have remained as Pre-Cambrian fossil traces, and that changing composition of the oceans later permitted diverse life forms with skeletal structures to develop in the Cambrian period.

Professor Reynolds will do his field work in the Rockies in northwestern Montana and southwestern Alberta. There Pre-Cambrian rock formations were pushed to the surface as the mountain range was created by upheavals of the earth's crust. He came to Dartmouth this fall after five years with Pan American Petroleum, where he was a senior research engineer. He was graduated from Lafayette College in 1951 and received his Ph.D. at Washington University in 1955.

WING-TSIT CHAN, Professor of Chinese Culture, gave two lectures on Confucianism and contemporary Chinese thought at the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department recently in an intensive area program for heads of missions and foreign service officers who are about to be stationed in the Far East. This was the sixth time that Professor Chan has lectured at the Institute.

DARTMOUTH mathematicians have received a $54,700 grant from the National Science Foundation for a two-year study of the interrelation of two mathematical fields. Professor John G. Kemeny, chairman of the Mathematics Department, and Associate Professor J. Laurie Snell will attempt to evolve further applications of a classical mathematical field, potential theory, for a relatively new one, probability. The research is entitled, "Potential Theory for Stochastic Processes." The grant is the largest the Mathematics Department has ever received for pure research.

Professor Kemeny explained that potential theory has its primary applications in the physical sciences. Modern probability theory, which is about thirty years old, has been applied in both the social and physical sciences. Potential theory, for instance, might be concerned in physics with the field created in the building up of an electrical charge. Probability theory might be useful in political science to predict voter behavior. In a new book, Mathematical Models and the Social Sciences, Professors Kemeny and Snell show the similarity and applications of both techniques. In one section they developed a mathematical model for the problem of currency control, that is the flow of actual paper money from city to city. Through its use, Federal bank officials might watch for departures from the normal amount of currency available in an area and take steps to correct them. Five other mathematicians - John Lamperti, visiting professor from Stanford University, and four undergraduate research assistants - will be associated with Professors Kemeny and Snell in the research.

PROFESSOR Michel Benamou of the Department of Romance Languages is consultant to the Modern Language Association Materials Development Center. The Center is under contract with the United States Office of Education for the preparation of methods and manuals which will have a nationwide impact on language teaching. Professor Benamou is co-author of TheBeginning Audio-Lingual Materials inFrench to be used in 7th and 9th grades, as well as a general consultant in French.

POET and English Professor Richard Eberhart '26 has been chosen to deliver the George Elliston Poetry Foundation Lectures for 1961. Located at the University of Cincinnati, the Foundation has sponsored an annual program of public lectures by distinguished poets since 1951. Taking as his topic "Will and Psyche in Poetry," Professor Eberhart will give six lectures and two readings of his poems. Concurrent with the lectures will be a performance of Professor Eberhart's play, The Visionary Farms, by the Carousel Theater, Mummers Guild. Among other poets who have been chosen by the George Elliston Foundation are Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Karl Shapiro.

THREE members of the faculty are among the new contributors to the 1961 edition of the EncyclopaediaBritannica. Albert S. Carlson, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Geography, wrote the articles Connecticut River and Genesee. Professor Carlson also collaborated with other authorities to write the article Champlain Lake. The late Professor of History Richard B. McCornack '41 was responsible for writing parts of six articles: Durango; Mexico City; MexicoFederal District; Tampico; Veracruz (city); and Veracruz, (state). He is also the author of four other articles, Churubusco; Ciudad Juarez; San LuisPotosi; and Uruapan. Alfred F. Whiting, Curator of Anthropology at the Dartmouth College Museum, wrote the article Havasupai, describing the history and habits of the Indians who live near Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.

PROFESSOR of Botany Charles J. Lyon has received a $2500 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his research on the rate at which ocean waters submerged coastal forests some 4,000 years ago. Under an earlier grant Professor Lyon determined the average rate per century over a period of more than 900 years, and found marked differences in rate for three separate sites, on the North Atlantic seaboard. By determining the rate for shorter intervals of time he hopes to explain these differences and also help resolve a basic contradiction between his evidence and that of other geological studies.

Scientists have known for some time that the ocean level rose as water was released from melting polar icecaps. The rate of rise had not been established, however. To get his data Professor Lyon collects samples from ancient tree stumps and fragments still rooted in land now exposed at low tide. The wood is then dated by a recently developed method of measuring its radioactive carbon. By comparing the dates for trees at different altitudes Professor Lyon calculates the rate at which they were submerged. His results show that it took 320 years for the ocean to rise one foot on New Hampshire's coastline at Odiorne Point, in contrast with only 51 years at Fort Lawrence and 62 years at Grand Pre, two "drowned forest" sites in Nova Scotia. The average rate at Odiorne Point corresponds closely with data presented by a geological research team in 1956, according to Professor Lyon, and the ocean is now rising at about this same rate.

A KEY to life - how living cells convert energy from the sun into ,the chemical energy they need to live - is the subject of a new five-year study at the Dartmouth Medical School. The National Science Foundation recently awarded a $200,000 grant to a microbiological research team that is seeking the answer. Dr. R. Clinton Fuller, chairman of the Medical School's Department of Microbiology, is directing the program. He and his colleagues came to Dartmouth this year from the Brookhaven National Laboratory to carry on their work in energy metabolism.

The conversion of the sun's energy to chemical energy is essential to all life. Scientists have been trying for years to analyze this process since it produces almost all of man's sources of energy - food from plants which sustain men and animals, fuels like coal and petroleum which are the products of decayed vegetable matter, to name a few. The research team is seeking for the answer in micro-organisms within microbial cells such as bacteria and algae. The group hopes to contribute to an understanding of how the photochemical structure makes life-sustaining chemical compounds from radiant energy. The work is related to that of space biologists who are investigating using micro-organisms to provide oxygen and food for space travelers. On a prolonged flight to outer space where every pound of weight is precious, oxygen supply is a major problem.

Dr. Fuller, who received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1952, had been associated with Brookhaven since 1955. From 1952 to 1955 he was a research microbiologist at the University of California Radiation Laboratory, working with Professor Melvin Calvin's photosynthesis group. Last year he was at Oxford University as a senior postdoctoral fellow of the National Science Foundation. The microbiology staff includes Dr. Clarke T. Gray, Associate Professor of Microbiology, who joined the Dartmouth group after ten years at Harvard Medical School's Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, and Dr. David E. Hughes, visiting scientist from the University of Oxford for 1961-62. Among the four other staff members are Dr. C. R. Benedict and Dr. S. F. Conti, both research associates at Brookhaven in 1959-60. Dr. Benedict will be concerned with biochemical aspects of the study, collaborating with members of the Biochemistry Department who are working on related projects. Dr. Conti, in charge of electron microscopy, will work closely with the Medical School's cytology group.

John B. Stearns '16, faculty member since 1927, has been named Daniel Webster Professor of the Latin Language and Literature.

Prof. Waldo ChambProf. Waldo Chamberlin of New York University, who has been namewho has been named to the newly created post of Dcreated post of Summer Programs at Dartmouth. Forat Dartmouth. the story about his duties see the opening nsee the opening news section in this issue.