balsa wood has found an increasing market "in the air." It is the lightest wood known and is of sufficient strength to serve well on both airplanes and airships. Thus Akron's industries and South America's rubber and balsa wood complement each other.

Naturally, the Nation's largest electrical plant-comprising many buildings covering hundreds of acres could not fail to hold the attention of foreign visitors. Many products from Latin America and the world in general are made use of in such an establishment. But one of the subjects that claimed especial attention was the number of Latin American students and workers to be seen busily engaged in labor of one kind or another. Student courses attract foreigners and in recent years young South and Central Americans have found service and salaries in these great works. Moreover, there are usually under construction giant turbines or other machinery destined for industrial activity in the nations to the south.

Of particular interest on this occasion was the broadcasting of the voices of Latin American visitors. Each member of the group was given a few minutes in which to address radio listeners in his home country. In charge of the microphone was a young Latin American

whose familiarity with Spanish, Portuguese, and English makes him an invaluable and permanent employee of the company.

At a well-known industrial establishment in Rochester a sight unusual to the average person is presented by more than a hundred bars of silver, or about 3 tons. Yet this mass of one of the precious metals is only a week's supply for the factory; in other words, the silver is here to be converted into photosensitive materials. The process appears to be wanton destruction; even if silver is of lower than normal value we are shocked to see the big bars dissolved in nitric acid. Silver nitrate, it may be recalled, is sensitive to light; it loses its whiteness under

the influence of sun's rays. It is this basic chemical fact that makes photography possible. Speaking of the silver, the company tells us: "Into every bar a hole is drilled, a record number is punched. Chips from the drillings are tested by the department handling the silver. . . . If a trace of copper or iron were permitted, unchecked, to go into the manufacturing stream, endangering photographic effectiveness, later tests would discover and eliminate the results, but time and other materials would have been wasted." The manufacture of photographic supplies is but one process utilizing silver which is supplied the United States and other countries by Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and other countries to the south of us.

SILVER BULLION FROM A MEXICAN MINE

The silver mines of many of the Latin American republics supply metal for use in various industries of the United States, of which the manufacture of photographic supplies is but one.

Hartford is the home of the "Wasp" and "Hornet"-both names. significant of speed and power on the wing. Within a few years small factories have evolved into giant establishments for producing these famous engines that are propelling planes and carrying passengers over land and sea. Naturally, visitors from Latin American countries feel more than ordinary interest in air transportation because it is to-day connecting many a wild and distant region of those newer nations with their civilized centers.

89921-32-Bull. 1-4

A SECTION OF THE BERMUDEZ ASPHALT LAKE, VENEZUELA A small section of the 1,000-acre deposit from which the vegetation has been cleared to permit the extraction of the asphalt.

An official opens certain chambers of one of the engines-he wants to show some of the finest pieces of mechanism that any land can boast. Here are the precisely working pistons, caps, meshes, all of the hardest steel. "What kind of steel?" a visitor asks. The engineer responds, "Vanadium." "Ah," continues the visitor, "you called on Peru to help harden your steel-to send you that valuable metal from the great heights of her mountains, and in changed form it helps man and machine to navigate the heights of space." Vanadium is, indeed, coming into greater use not only in aviation but in many other industries.

"Your marvelous boulevards and endless highways," said one of the visitors, "astonish me-they are far more extensive than I expected to see." "But do you know," replied one of the American members of the party, "that Venezuelan asphalt is imported in vast quantities to help build the streets and roads of which you speak?" Then ensued animated conversation regarding the world's largest deposits of asphalt-those in eastern Venezuela and in Trinidad. Operations at both of these places not only supply the needs of the United States, but furnish much asphalt for export to Europe, the Far East, Australia, and to various American Republics. Asphalt has been a much-used commodity in the United States and its mining and importation represent enormous investments. Philadelphia is the most important port of this country in the receipt and distribution of asphalt cargo.

"Fifty-five years ago there was no telephone; but there was a telephone laboratory." This sentence synthesizes a tendency of half a century ago a tendency far more pronounced to-day-that long hours and years of research precede most great industrial enterprises. The business of the telephone has during the last decade brought American Republics into closer-some into almost instant-contact. Back of this intimate communication stand the Bell Laboratories where the visitor watches entranced as wizards unfold the unknown and the seemingly impossible before his eyes. What are the marvels? Too numerous to mention! But here are a few: 2-way television, dial impulses changed to oral instructions, repeaters that amplify currents, multichannel carriers, vacuum tubes that demonstrate the defraction of electrons all associated with improving communications between peoples everywhere on the earth.

Thus as the delegates separated in New York to take their homeward way by train, boat, or airplane, they knew that distance was no longer a barrier between their countries.

DIEGO RIVERA EXHIBITS IN NEW YORK

RESCOES especially painted in New York by Diego Rivera

FRESCOS in the w nan exhibition of the

work of this great Mexican artist which opened December 23, 1931, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This exhibition is one more evidence of the increasing interest of the United States in Mexico and Mexican culture.

By bringing Rivera to New York to paint the frescoes, the museum made it possible for American art lovers and the interested public to see characteristic examples of the artist's work in his most famous medium. Since frescoes can not be shipped with safety, it has hitherto been impossible for Americans to see Rivera's most celebrated work without a journey to Mexico. Those he painted for the New York show are variations of some of his best-known Mexican subjects. His frescoes in Mexico City are found on the four walls of two 3-storied patios in the Department of Education and in the Preparatory School near by; in the School of Agriculture at Chapingo, not far from the capital; and in the Palace of Cortés at Cuernavaca, for which they were generously commissioned by the late Dwight W. Morrow. Rivera's work on a series in the National Palace, Mexico City, was interrupted by his journey to the United States. In Idols Behind Altars Anita Brenner says of Rivera's frescoes:

No lyric, no dramatic urge informalizes this cerebral world. Rivera builds a house accessible to the mind. Upon the abstract structure conceived in æsthetic terms he pours a cast of philosophic ideas. The human beings and their courses that he represents are chosen for a symbolic purpose. He does not garble their textures, but to sensual beauties he arrives last, curiously enough an exception to the native habit of seeing the physical object first.

The fact that it was the first time, so far as is known, that a museum had brought a great artist to a city to do special work on such a large scale for a single exhibition aroused special interest and focused attention on the frescoes, especially in view of the reputation of the artist for his accomplishments in this medium not only at home but in the Stock Exchange and in the California Academy of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where he completed frescoes last year.

The frescoes painted especially for the New York show are hung in the museum's largest gallery, the focal point and climax of the exhibition. They illustrate Rivera's characteristic vitality of design, his clarity, and his feeling for perspective. Viewing them, one can understand why the artist is credited with revitalizing painting in this medium, and why he is considered the greatest living master of fresco painting. His is the superior craftsmanship which earned fame for the exponents of that technique of the Italian Renaissance, and he is