APES TO TALK WITH FINGERS?

A chimpanzee might be taught to talk with its fingers, as deaf people talk, more easily than it could be taught to imitate sounds of human speech, in the opinion of Dr. Robert M. Yerkes and Margaret S. Child of the Institute of Psychology at Yale University.

Several scientists who have observed and studied higher apes have tried to teach them to say words, but without much success, these psychologists state in reporting in the Quarterly Review of Biology what is now known about anthropoid behavior.

"Perhaps the chief reason for the ape's failure to develop speech is the absence of a tendency to imitate sounds," Dr. Yerkes explains. "Seeing strongly stimulates to imitation, but hearing seems to have no such effect."

REVIVES "DEAD" HEARTS

A "heart hormone," a physiologically powerful chemical compound secreted within the living heart and acting to keep the heart beating ceaselessly, has been discovered by Dr. Ludwig Haberlandt of the University of Innsbruck. It is to be classed with the secretions of the ductless glands, such as the thyroid in the throat and the adrenals near the kidneys, which have far-reaching effects in the lives of men and animals, and some of which are now widely used in medicine.

ANALYZES CONVERSATION

"American women talk predominantly about men and clothing. Englishwomen talk most frequently of other women or of themselves."

This is not a bright epigram from a fiction writer's notebook. It is the conclusion of an American psychologist who spent an afternoon and evening listening on a busy London street, and, as a result, carried away notes showing the subject matter of 200 British conversations. The conversations were carefully classified in order to show what English men or women say to each other and vice versa.

The psychologist, who is Dr. Carney Landis of Wesleyan University, has compared his conversation samples with similar collections overheard in the streets of New York and Columbus.