THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



The situation grew to be so bad that the American Association 

 for the Advancement o£ Science decided to employ a press editor. 

 The late Theodore Waters, a very clever and intelligent reporter 

 and magazine writer, was chosen. He was an acknowledged 

 member of the newspaper fraternity and knew newspaper men 

 and how they thought. He was employed to see not only that 

 the best things were properly reported, but that flippant and 

 derisive articles were not written. I shall mention in another 

 chapter an amusing story of how he did this.^ With Waters' 

 efforts the situation began to improve, and this improvement 

 has gone on rapidly ever since. 



A clever scientific man, a chemist, named E. E. Slosson, wrote 

 a book entitled "Creative Chemistry" and showed to a marked 

 degree that science may be made vitally interesting by the right 

 kind of a writer. The eyes of newspaper editors were opened 

 to the fact that they had been neglecting an enormously inter- 

 esting field. Mr. Scripps, of one of the great press associations, 

 got this idea at an early date, and talked much about the subject 

 with his friend Professor W. E. Ritter of the University of Cali- 

 fornia. From these conferences came the founding of Science 

 Service, which has on its board of control representatives from 

 the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science to insure the scientific accuracy 

 of everything put out. Its director was Dr. Slosson, who was 



^ Waters, dear fellow, died rather recently. When he left the American Associa- 

 tion he became connected with the Christian Herald and late in the World War 

 was sent on a relief supply expedition to the Orient. He had become a great friend 

 of my youngest daughter, who, he knew, intended to become a newspaper woman, 

 and he wrote her a letter on the steamer somewhere off the east coast of Africa 

 in which the following paragraph occurred: "And if, Janet, you wish ever to 

 express the idea of sheer and utter ineffectiveness" (he had told her in the pre- 

 ceding sentence that some hens had broken from their coops on board) "think 

 of a flock of hens scratching for worms on the iron deck of a tramp steamer in 

 the Indian Ocean." 



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