His

One of our great American naturalists said he loved his work because the information the plants gave him was always the truth. It was only through a fault in his own observing that he could go wrong. In the field of his work there was no factor put there to deceive. It is not always so when we deal with men. In fact it is sometimes almost exactly the opposite.

We might assemble a long line of occupations or fields of work graded with reference to their resistance to producing the truth or with respect to the percentage of truth produced. We might place at one end of this line the field of scientific investigation and at the other, tentatively at least, political investigation-senatorial, perhaps.

Then, leaving the fields of work, we might consider all the workmen and grade them with respect to their ideals, the motives for their efforts. To be more specific, we might grade them in a long line, starting with the above mentioned naturalist, with respect to their desire to find the truth. At one end we might again place our scientific investigator and at the other, tentatively at least, a political investigatorpossibly a senator; especially if we wait a little for the development of what

An unprovoked elaboration of Mr. H. A. Wheeler's paper entitled "Some Facts About Teapot Dome" published in the April Journal. Oral discussion of this article is not invited and any impulse to this end should be suppressed. Failing this. comment should be written and mailed to the editor. Such effusions, however, may be boomerangs. They will be if they can be made so.

now seems to be a growing public disgust at the solely political motives of some of the investigators in action at Washington.

I have thought we might have mathematical expressions for our rules of living to express our standards in a way. When we think of the variety of standards of living, we may wonder if there can be found enough mathematical expressions to go 'round; but mathematical expressions often occur in large families, and there occurred to me the name of such a family with which I used to have a sort of working acquaintance -the conic sections-from which we can pick an equation and a diagram for almost any grade of human character.

Let us take the first-the simplest of them all the circle. Let this represent the rule of living of some people who are very very good and just, such as ministers and very good professors. Its equation is x2+y=1. like this:

Y

T

It looks

X

Its co-ordinate axes intersect exactly in the center. One is perfectly upright and the other is absolutely on the level. The locus of a point-and the human unit is for this purpose a point is on this curve; the arc of a circle. Every position is equally distant from the center, i. e., the junction of the upright and the level axes and, while the relative distance to these two axes varies, our model citizen leaves one only to ap

proach the other. His position is always definite. All points on the arc are reached by x+y=1 and the good man at P always has many ways back to the center of which one, P O, is a perfectly straight line and the other, PTO, is perfectly square.

Unfortunately the world of people is not all so perfect. Most of us are more or less eccentric and will not fit on the circle. I tried hard, for this special occasion, to put the engineers on the circle, but decided we would have to allow for some eccentricity. It wasn't much, however, and we found a conic-the ellipse-which is characterized by having an eccentricity less than 1. Write e for eccentricity and e<1 for the ellipse. The X2, y2

equation is

this, viz.:

2

1. +: a b

It looks like

We will let x=moral rectitude and y financial condition. All engineers have their locus on this ellipse, but they never get to the left of the middle. Most of them keep in the northeast quadrant. We were somewhat annoyed to note that, with the above supposition, maximum moral qualities occur at the extreme right and at that point the prosperity curve points straight down. It seemed advisable to throw out the whole plan until we happened to notice that it also points straight up.

We have other people to consider now, to whom we will allow morebut just a little more-eccentricity, than

The line ON is an asymptote of this curve. It goes right on up through N to infinity. It is the guiding line which limits the direction of the curve, SO we will let it represent the law. The curve is the locus of our own free action. It goes a long way but must not cross the asymptote. The conservative business man works quite close to K on the curve, i. e., to the axis. I should say the man who buys government bonds is right on it. He can even get quite a bit off the curve without running into the law. By keeping on the level axis he can go from K clear out to O. We have marked that space O K.

A manufacturer does not usually remain so conservative. He wants more room. He may want to speculate a little and make a good trade. We will put him up the curve to about M. From there he can just see the asymptote coming his way and bend his course accordingly, but it is still quite a distance away and he works right along and pretends to not notice it.

It takes still a little more latitude to be an oil producer. We cannot be so conservative as the manufacturer. You