Columbia University College of Pharmacy - Apothekan Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 31 text:

Professor Pokorny, the dapper young educator with an office sit- uated on the fourth floor, was assigned the impossible task of teaching us botany. It was only natural that we picked up a little about the bee and bird activities on the side. The expedition to nearby Central Park revealed the wealth of beauty which abounded amiast steel and concrete. Banjoeyes kept us happy with his clever blackboard illustrations, one of the best of which was the Story of the Insectivorous Plant. The Pro- fessor woul d start off by drawing the unsuspecting insect climbing into the flov.er; then the insect would be portrayed as intoxicated, and thus would fint-lly find himself unable to stagger hone to his wife and seven larvae, entrapped by hi6 o.vn impulsive folly. Ah, what a touching moral to be derived froa this instance of insect versus jlant. The laboratory work in Botany was fairly simple j one look through the microscope, one look at an illustration in the textbook, and one look at what somebody else was sketching, were all that was necessary before a group of three could turn out satisfactory drawings. Zoology lab q ' lickly replaced botany, md proved to be nn equally suitable pl ce for lab oratory. H. Randolph Halsey, the director of the butcher shop, used « different pipe for every day in the semester, a nd his fondness for the cultivated week was evidenced by a throat-clearing roar after every fourth sentence of a 1-cture. His non-committal basso profundo uh-huh, with emphasis on the second syllable, was the char- acteristic response to a student ' s complaints or observations. Tte soon accustomed ourselves to the instructor ' s quaint peculiarities, and also to the gory lab work. After mangling a frog, and then a lobster, we got to the point where it became a perfectly naturel custom to devour lunch without gastric mishap while dissecting an oversized pickled cockroach. Say, do you know Sam? Tihy, he was one of the best chem teachers we ever had mo.de the acquaintance of. Still, as a means of maintaining chemical pence, equipment waa •tewed away in lookers as soon ;s Sam ap- peared within a twenty -foot radius, and mass emigration to the balance- room or the hood began instantaneously. Stragglers ruickly emptied all test tubes, turned off all Bunsens, and started washing even the clean- est equipment. But don ' t get the wrong impression. He thought fondly of Professor Lib erman, even though just one studied look from him did make us slash our wrists tdth b broken beaker. He merely endeavored to avoid the inevitable question: Do you know Tfftp.t you ' re doing? the answer to which would have caused a rapid depopulation of the realm of chemistry. It is probable, to say the least, that the master wouldn ' t have approv- ed our side experiments, such as the manufacture of synthetic meatballs from ferric hydroxide, or the technique of vaporizing solutions to dry- ness in a Gooch crucible. Sam never did get over his feeling of impend- ing danger after one wit put nine drops each of hydrochloric, sulfuric, and nitric acids on a crucible cover, heated it to 350° Centigrade, and then waved the fuming liquid overhead in the laboratory to imitate sky- writing. As if he didn ' t care pny more about living, ( and no with thor- oughly destroyed nasal mucosa), Professor Liberman permitted us to take iuantitative Inorganic Analysis. After spending et least three weeks on calibrating our weights, and le rnint; the differences between a balf.nce and a scale, we were subjected to the principal principles of gravimet- ric analysis. It was fortunate for us that simultaneously the peculir.r havits end customs of the gremlins Tre.re studied in eneively. The grem- lins, and their cousins, the chemlins, provided the only logic;! answer for our getting results which had an tverage devit tion of t proximately