Evening star., 1932-08-28

hands on. Or how he got everybody talk
ing about the iodine in seafoOd.
That's an interesting story, too; it goes
back to the days when old Armand
Gautier of Paris wondered where the
iodine in our thyroid glands comes from
food, water or air? Air, he thought.
He found little or no iodine in the Paris
air at street level; but when he climbed
the Pantheon and scraped off dust 40
meters up, he found quite a lot of iodine
in it. There was still more in dust 73
meters above the street; but more yet
in the air over the sea.
But without going into all that, the
upshot of Taylor's Investigations was
that he got Donald X. TreSsler to ana
lyze all kinds of fish for their iodine con-
tent. The Bureau of Fisheries bulletin
on that attracted wide attention. Peo-
pie became iodine conscious. IodiZed
salt was invented. Now South Carolina
calls itself the Iodine State-even on
its automobile license plates. South
Carolina vegetables, being grown near
the sea, contain more iodine than vege-
tables that are grown inland.
One time he became fascinated by the
old, old question-why does the salmon
leave the sea in it's third year of life
and 60 up fresh-water streams to lay
its eggs? That's queer thing for a
saltwater fish to do. Harden Taylor
made an excursion into the subject and
reached a very suggestive conclusion
In preparation for egg laying, the fe-
male salmon gets fatter and fatter Get
ting fatter and fatter, she becomes rela-
lively lighter and lighter in weight. 1t
becomes harder and harder for her to
stay down in salt water, just as a fat
man can't help floating. I know a
stoutish book publisher who habitually
takes a nap lying on his back in deep
water.
A book publisher prefers to stay on
top. A salmon doesn't. There is only
one way she can stay down without a
lot of hard work. That is to find water
without so much salt in it. So quite
probably it is a simple law of physics,
not some mysterious psychology, that
leads salmon inevitably and unerringly
to the mouths of streams at spawning
time
During the war the fisheries had a
prodigiously important part to play in.
supplying good, low-coSt food and plenty
of it. Harden Taylor was put in charge
of the bureaus research and told to do
everything he could to further that end.
The line of research he chose to follow
was thoroughly practical, then and
of :,
concentrating on the key problems Of
the industry. wherever fish were caught,
there was he-from Northern Alaska to
Southern Florida, from Nova Scotia to
San Diego and points between.
It is spilling no beans to say that the
fish industry then was away behind other =
food industries in the use of up-todate
methods, scientific knowledge, econom-
ical practices. Except for the use of ice,
fish were handled much as they were
when all Gaul was divided into three
parts and Julius Caesar had mullet for
dinner. The consumer was fish ignorant,
and he quite commonly lost in the gam
BILE of getting really fresh fish.
In the last Is years the industry has
been going through an evolution that
amounts to revolution. Tangible evil
dence is the fact that in inland towns
farthest from the sea, the housewife can
get neat, quick-frozen, boneless, pack
aged f1llets, pearly and appetizing.
; lust how must influence Harden Tay-
~ lor has had in that revolution 1t
would be hard to say, but think it was
a large influence. He was-and still is
-tireless in working out effective new
methods, and he minced very few words
in bedeviling the industry into abandon
ing archaic, wasteful practices. But it's