Word: shafer
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...George Daniel Shafer had had a full, busy career as professor of physiology at Stanford University. On the first morning of the college year after "Emeritus" was added to his former title, Professor Shafer, feeling lonely and at loose ends, wandered into his beehouse. There he began to watch a mud-dauber wasp as she buzzed purposefully to the window sill, stretched her forefeet out like a kitten, and took a sun bath. She seemed to know exactly what she was about. In a matter of minutes Shafer's admiration was aroused and he found a new and absorbing...
Nine years later, old Professor Shafer published a sprightly brief of his findings : The Ways of a Mud Dauber (Stanford University Press; $2.50), a slender (74 pp.) book telling what he learned about Sceliphron cementarium during several happy summers. The volume is dedicated to a crippled mud dauber, "Crumple-Wing," of which Shafer was especially fond...
Tidy Habits. From Crumple-Wing and her kin, Shafer learned some inside details of the mud dauber's life cycle. One of the most striking was the insect's built-in sanitary facilities. Each egg is laid in a separate mud cell, along with perhaps a dozen spiders which have been paralyzed by the mother wasp's sting. After the larva hatches from the egg, it begins to eat the spiders...
Sensitive Friends. Dr. Shafer made friends with individual mud daubers. He became convinced that "adult females of this species possess a nervous system which, though tiny in size, enables them to remember, to learn, and to show individuality." Several were trained to eat a drop of honey from his hand. One let him stroke her while she ate. She became so fond of him that Dr. Shafer had difficulty keeping her away from an alcohol lamp with which he was working in the lab. Twice he had to put her out of the room. After the first expulsion, he reports...
Other new officers are: Pegasus, Donald Andrew Hall, Jr. '51 of Hamden, Connecticut and Eliot House; Treasurer, Robert Montgomery Scott '51 of Villanova, Pennsylvania and Eliot House; Secretary, William E. Wiggin '50 of Beverly Farms and Eliot House; and Bacchus, Arthur Chase Shafer '51 of Cincinnati, Ohio and Eliot House...