Kodaikanal, South India.
June 19, 1922.Dear Miss Turner,
The house mail came today and brought your note of May 17th and the list of supplies you ordered for us as well as the Harvard catalogue. I'm very grateful to you for tending to it so quickly. There are still two and a half weeks before college opens so I have hope that the things may come yet. A. H. Thomas Co. have been very good to me so far, but of course the job isn't finished yet. It gives me a bit of a thrill to be corresponding with them and Spencer Lens on my own, where all my communications heretofore have been in the capacity of meek and modest secretary!
Have you seen Edith Coon at all? We have heard very little from her since she landed but a scrap of a note from Elizabeth Osgood told me that she had been awarded a fellowship. No indication of when she will use it. When she left she was leaning toward Chicago or Tech. We've hoped that she would send some news of the new chemistry person who is still, as far as we know, an unknown quantity. I've wondered if Margaret Willcox might not be the one, but I don't know.
It's good news about the new science building. Somebody sent me the Press Club's letter telling of the plans and they sound very encouraging. Having assisted Williston in its last days, I feel that I have a personal claim on its successor and I'll be interested to hear of its development. Our own is not yet begun but sounds more hopeful just now. Plans were finished up in November but there came the bitter blow that the government's poverty demanded the withdrawal of all building grants for the coming year. Since we were counting on a two-thirds grant we dared not go ahead. Now the government tells us that we may go ahead with what we have and that they will give us grant when money becomes available, if it becomes available. We have enough from America to carry us through for a year anyway, but it will take at least three years to build. If I can have our year in it before my furlough I'll be happy!
A lady in Massachusetts (that's all we know) has given us $1000 for a new chapel and that is to be started at once. The plans are very attractive, as Oriental as possible. The girls will sit on the floor according to Indian custom. With two buildings going at once we shall be very distracted.
It is hard to believe that the first year is over. I barely kept my head above water as far as my courses were concerned, so I was greatly relieved at the success of my students in the University examinations. All of my three B.A.'s passed; and one is now teaching in a second grade college while the other two are teachingin high schools. Of my seven Intermediates there was one very surprising failure - a girl who has been unquestionably near the top in all of her subjects and who failed in everything. I'm very sorry for she had been hoping to go to America for medicine and now it is very doubtful whether the friends who were going to finance her will do so later. She has taken it like a brick and will teach a year, study by herself and take the examinations over again. The other six all passed and one of them passed with a first class. We are much elated with our results since the results from the whole presidency make an average of only 25% passes. I do think this examination system is vile.
Of my six successful Intermediates, one failed in her English so she is out for a year; three including the first class girl have applied for scholarships at Medical school, one is going to Presidency College (for men) to do her B.A. in chemistry and the other is, I hope, coming back to us for B.A. in Biology. It remains to be seen how many others will be in my junior B.A. class. Queen Mary's, the government college for women, has no B.A. work in science so some of their girls may come to us. I am glad nine are going on to medical work, for India needs them badly, but I hate to lose them. They are the girls who I was teaching physiology and they are my pet class. In the Intermediate classes there is a rush toward science. Of the fifty-five first year students last year, twenty-eight were in the science group and it looks as though the proportions would be about the same next year.
I get very much disgusted with the Zoology, especially the B.A. work. The whole course is similar to the Invertebrate course at Woods Hole - type, type, type, with detailed classification of every group, straight through from Protozoa to Mammalia, - never approached from the comparative view point and including only text-work in embryology and none in history or biological theory. If there were a closer relation between the Intermediate work (first two years) and the B.A. work (last two) I would be more hopeful of working in embryology, etc., into the B.A. But every scrap of zoo that is done in the Intermediate is repeated in the B.A. - and the physiology is omitted. However, I'm making a desperate effort to plan my courses so that I can cover the prescribed work and still get in bits of the more interesting branches. Since I am the only European biologist in the University, and very young at that, and every Indian has had his training in the University, I see little hope of any change in the University calendar.
I have been here in Kodai since the middle of April and have had an A1 vacation. We're 7000 feet up, surrounded by rolls and rolls of bare hills that remind me of pictures of the Arizona desert more than of anything else I've seen. The air is crisp and refreshing, and there are a great number of hurricanes to add to the joys. Oh, Miss Turner, you must take a year off and come to India soon! You would be as wild over this tramping as I am, and that's saying a lot. A short time ago some of us went on a week's camping trip (here we have coolies to carry bedding!) and had the time of our young lives. There are long steady pulls up hill, a pause at the top to look at our road and dropping, dropping into the valley below us and then rising and twisting and curling out of sight around a hill top away beyond us; drinking from fresh mountain streams with the joy of unboiled water; resting in little sholas (a clump of trees of any size is a shola) to look off at the reds and browns and greens and yellows of the plains shining through the clouds thousands of feet below us; and finally, our destination readied, the fragrance of our bracken beds as we lie and look at the southern cross and the scorpion and Mars and Jupiter and Saturn. Normally one stays in the forest bungalows but we were very adventurous and scaled the next-to-the-highest peak in these hills, 8,200, and dropped 2500 feet to a great cave on the other side where we spent two nights. The way up the mountain lay through a great luck [?] shola for which we logged [?] ourselves with two pairs of salt soaked stockings and putters [?] and then made the best time possible at that angle. We tried to knock the creatures off as fast as they climbed on but even so one of the girls got a big bite. The last part of the climb was thrillingly dangerous, along the edge of a great stone cliff. I loved it. When we came back we met a young English hunter in the shola with a great pile of mammalian game. He is spending a month there collecting for the British Museum so if you go there and see specimens marked "South India," think of the the luches [?] that they must have endured. The prettiest things he had were the huge red and black Malabar squirrels.
A week ago four of us broke all Kodai records by doing this same trip to the cave and back, forty-four miles, in one day. We started at 12.15 midnight by full moon and walked all night, reaching the cave at 7.15. Oh, the glory and the glow of those moon-bathed hills and valleys, and the steady, silent swinging through the night! Nothing like it! Until you have actually seen the tropical moon it is difficult to believe how brilliant it is.
An hour later, after chotah [?] in the cave, started back and reached Pumbari, the middle-mark, at exactly 12.15 noon. Then we had breakfast and rested until 4.30 when the sun's rays were less formidable. Home at 7.30, ready for bed, I'll admit, but after a long night's sleep we were all frisky the next day.
It has been nice to see so many Holyoke folks here - twelve altogether: a Miss Howland of Dr. Clapp's time, Alice Van Doren '03, Dorothy Firman Van Ness '06, Elsie Conklin '08, Ella Draper '09 [sic], Mildred ? Witter ex '11, [sic] Frances Woods and Katherine Clark Dudley. '14, Adelaide Fairbank Wright, '15, Ruth Parker White '17, Helen Beardslee Potter '18 and yours truly '19. Wellesley comes second in its representation with eight (including me).
A good letter from D. Elizabeth a short time ago said that you and Charlotte Haywood were going to Europe this summer. I am so glad for you, and I envy Charlotte. Give England my love, please, especially Oxford and the Warwick-Kenilworth country.
Helen Howell finished her nurse's course this summer and my sister Julia finishes her course at Simmons and M. G. H. Her original plan had been to go into district work such as D. Elizabeth's sister is doing in Hyannis but she has become so enthused with her slum work in Charlestown that I don't know what she'll decide for next year. The following year I hope she'll come out here to be with Mother and Father for a short time and help them pack to go home in '24. Mother ought to go sooner but Father can't seem to see his way clear. I was there at Christmas time and was quite troubled by Mother's very frequent blind and dizzy spells. Father in spite of his seventy-eight years, is still very active.
I think of you very often, Miss Turner, and I hope you'll have a fine summer. How are your back, and your eyes?
With much, much love to you
Eleanor.P.S. - What journal would you recommend as the best for keeping one informed of current work in physiology? I feel very ancient in that respect.
I enclose a batch of snaps that I've been keeping for you for ages. Sorry I haven't more of India, but so far I have't been very successful in the tropical sun.