170 SCIENTIST 



of the brass, I don't believe that fathead Frasier out there 

 in Pasadena when he says he's measured an inside-outside 

 potential in gUa cells of 75 milUvolts. As a matter of fact, 

 I doubt if he got those clumsy electrodes of his inside a glia 

 cell at all. I've tried it a hundred times, and when the ana- 

 tomical sections come back, it always turns out that I was 

 probably in some sort of a neuron." 



"Maybe so," needled one of the senior graduate students, 

 "but I just saw in the Proc Soc (Proceedings of the Society 

 of Experimental Biology and Medicine) where he put his 

 electrodes into a scar where there were nothing but glia and 

 got the same thing." 



Nick turned to a blonde, rather shy girl at his left and 

 said, "Margot, why don't you tell the boys what you saw 

 down in New Orleans, besides, of course, the inside of 

 Antoine's and those boites on lower Basin Street." 



"Well," Margot said, "Nick sent me down to see what 

 Mike Finster in the zoology department is doing with that 

 fish he's just found that can make his skin look like the 

 bottom over which he is lying." 



"Nothing new about that," interjected the intense assist- 

 ant professor. "Bayliss had a picture of it in his classical text- 

 book which has been out of print for thirty years, and dear 

 old George Parker worked on the central mechanism for I 

 don't know how long." 



"Yes, but this fish is a bit different," Margot sofdy con- 

 tinued. "For one thing it's bigger, and the pattern it de- 

 velops is more precisely like the background. I saw some 

 of them, and it's really fantastic how they almost disappear 

 in two or three minutes after they're put into a new aquar- 

 ium with a different bottom. The big point is, though, that 

 Mike is interested in how they recognize the pattern. All 

 the older work is concerned with the motor side — what 



