The trustees of Roxbury Latin School in Boston, New England, met a month ago to fill a vacancy on their board, and among the alumni suggested as possibilities was James Bryant Conant. They rejected him on the ground that he wasn't well enough known. Three weeks later he was made president of Harvard, and were their faces red!

Scientists were just about as much surprised as the Roxbury trustees. Among his colleagues, Professor Conant has always been regarded as one who would be faithful to science forever, a dashing and daring fellow rather than a plodder, a little unorthodox, perhaps, but wedded to chemistry. "Why on earth--?" asked his intimates. "I guess it's my sense of adventure," he replied. It is generally agreed he is a great loss to science. In research, his guesses at explanations and results were uncannily accurate. His students claimed, a bit resentfully, that he had an intuitive flair for chemistry, as some men have a flair for chemistry, as some men have a flair for music or verse. He worked here and there in half a dozen scattered fields, but any feeling that he was dilettantish in any is not justified by the sober worth of more than a hundred scientific papers he has written. He has been interested in chemistry since he was fourteen. At fifteen, while in the Roxbury School, he was giving shows for the neighborhood boys, billing himself as "Young Edison" and charging admission. He turned water into wine, made smells and explosions, and devoted the proceeds to buying new laboratory equipment. In 1915, after he had graduated from Harvard, a rubber company wanted him to be head of a research laboratory in Ohio. He visited their plant and then told them off. "I'm going to be married," he said, "and the kind of woman I'd marry wouldn't live in Ohio. If she did, I wouldn't marry her." He has an intense affection for New England and for Harvard. The girl he was going to marry was the daughter of Professor Richards of Harvard, a Nobel Prize-winner in chemistry. Or that's the girl he did marry, at any rate.

Conant has never owned an automobile. He likes mountain-climbing, tramping, and beer. He has seen just one movie: "Arrowsmith." He reads the radical publications and was sufficiently interested in economics to investigate thoroughly the Russian five-year plan. He is a member of the Harvard Republican Club but voted for Roosevelt, after considering Thomas. His admiration for the President has grown, and he is gratified that he seeks advice from college professors. --The New Yorker.