Trees for the Scientist

ABOUT twenty-five years ago, when the University of Arizona was an uncredited fledgling, young Bachelors of Science and Doctors of Philosophy from other schools began to beat a path to its humble gates. They paid their fees, and they studied dendrochronology under Dr. A. E. Douglass, the astronomy professor whose research work in this new field was setting up much scien tific controversy. And when people heard that dendrochronology was merely the study of the rings of trees, they marvelled at the ways of science and never expected to find out what it was all about.

Today when the University's graduates can boast of its excellence, the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research is the school's classic asset, Dr. Douglass is a big name in Ameri can science, and everybody knows that tree rings are important.

The Laboratory of Tree Ring Research in the University Stadium Building at Tucson is a number of well-lighted rooms where neat slabs of big tree trunks lie on the tables, and enlarged photographs of beaut fully-grained wood hang on the walls and where somebody or other is always peering through a microscope at little slivers snipped out of a log, or leaning over sheets of graph paper, or doing something with a room-long instrument called the cyclograph. Dr. Douglass, who may usually be found there very early in the morning, is a whitehaired, witty, ramrod-backed man with New England dignity, Western friendliness, and cool, deep-set eyes.

Everything about this Laboratory and the scientist whose work it was established to perpetuate implies a disciplined but determined assault on some baffling enemy of humanity. But there are no dramatic trophies on display to prove that this is so -no heads nailed to the wall, or pelts spread on the floor, nor even any pictures of likely-looking germs-nothing except the tree-ring specimens, which, like the fingerprints of bad men on file at Washington, are more revealing than they look to sightseers. For tree rings carry the fingerprints of our most unpredictable friend and foe, that Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde-of-theskies who has fed and warmed and starved and fooled men since the beginning of time the weather.

In our time, men who admitted that the weather was a mystery began to inquire into its inexplicable changes with the sensitive instruments and ingenious patience of vigorous scientific era. They made no promises, these astronomers and physicists and meteorologists, nor do they yet. But if they had not believed that sometime they could pool their knowledge and solve the Great Enigma, they surely would not have kept on working.

These men were handicapped in a thousand ways by the immensity of the universe and man's small knowledge in the face of it, but one of their most obvious difficulties was the lack of reliable information on the climatic changes of the past. The weather records kept by our ancestors were fragmentary and inaccurate, and the best of them went back only a few generations. Astronomers and climatologists searched through old books and diaries and legends for data on climatic variations of long ago -not knowing then that the weather records they needed so badly were standing in the forests waiting to be discovered. (Turn to Page 34)