OPTICIAN HAD HIS EYES OPEN

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5296, 8 January 1947, Page 2

OPTICIAN HAD HIS EYES OPEN

AUSTRALIAINi SCIENTISTS' CAPACITY FOR PRAWNS .SYDNEY The eyes of a visiting English optical expert opemed with amazenent when he saw the speed and orecision with which a group of Australian scientists disposed of 601b. of orawns. The occasion was the • 3'Oth annual >moke night of the staff social club of the Australian Miuseum. In the clubroom, which is not Inore ;han 25 feet square, 90' men sat 'down :o celebrate. Clean dry sand covered the floor. The entire back wall was a coloured nural of a South Sea Island. On- the ta'bles prawns lay in heaps — not on plates, but on great • clarnshells. Enjoying themselves at the feast were two entomologists, a conchologist and a m-arine zoologist, an ichthyoloigist, tw'o geolo^ists and a mineralogist, a hotanical chemist, a mammaiogist and an anthropologirt, two ornithologists, and ;a herpet'ologist, a palaeontlogist and a palaeobotanist. The palaeontologist agreed that it would have been a simple matter to get a scratch team togeher out of this crowd and heat the Americans in the race to the Antarcic. He ought to have known — ^he was with Mawson at the South Polar regions some years ago.