Chippings

FRENCH OR GERMAN? Abseil or Rappel, Bergschrund or Rimaye? Writers of articles in mountaineering journals seem to use the word appropriate to the district in which they have crossed the “mountain gap” (Webster) or “roped down” (J. H. B. Bell). The unfortunate Editor is faced with the problem—to standardise or to leave things safely as they stand? In the absence of tidy English words on which to standardise, if such be his wish, shall he borrow from the Teuton or the Gaul? In the current number of the Y.R.C.J, the choice has been for German, only because the German words seem to be in more general use in English. Comments would be welcomed.

H.G.W.

How LONG DO BATS LIVE? Bulletin No. 13 of the Equipe Speleo de Bruxelles quotes several papers on this subject. In Holland a bat, species Myotis Mystacinus, has been recovered 18-^ years after it was ringed. The record was reported by Norbert Casteret for a bat of species Rhinolophus Ferum Equinum, recaptured after 23^ years. Bulletin No. 17 describes the different types of bats found in Belgian caves and gives, with sketches, some of the characteristics whereby they can be identified. Copies of these Bulletins are in the Y.R.C. Library.

H.G.W.

WHY NOT JOIN THE SKI CLUB OF GREAT BRITAIN? The President of the S.C.G.B., in the 1963 Yearbook, is disturbed that membership remains static at 15,000 while British skiers visiting the Alps each year now number nearly 300,000. He concludes that at the present time the Club has not got enough to offer to secure a steady build-up in members. He makes suggestions whereby the Club might be enabled to make available to all its members better or cheaper facilities for ski-ing, but in reading these suggestions one cannot get away from the feeling that too much emphasis is still laid on racing, a branch of the Club’s activities which costs a lot of money and takes up much time. The formation, in March 1964, of the National Ski Federation of Great Britain, the primary object of which is stated to be “to discharge the responsibilities previously undertaken by the Ski Club of Great Britain in respect of national and international competitive ski-ing”, may mean that the Ski Club will now be able to devote more money and especially more of its representatives’ time at the ski centres to arranging and leading “off the piste” excursions and tours. The Club has already set up a Travel Advisory Bureau and runs a free course of pre-ski instruction for new members. If these activities were more fully organised, and were more widely known, the Club would have a much greater appeal to those 285,000 skiers in Great Britain who are not members, and its future would be assured as what Sir Arnold Lunn calls “a Club of genuine amateur holiday skiers”.

H.G.W.

ALPINE FLORA. The Swiss Alpine Club has recently circulated among its members a little book, La Grande Pitie de Notre Flore Alpine, by AugustePiccard and Emmanuel Stickelburger, pointing out how many of the rare and lovely flowering plants of the alpine regions are in danger of extinction. The cause is not so much the uprooting of the plants by collectors or for sale, but the wholesale gathering of the flowers, with the resulting loss of seeds to propagate new plants. A plant, like any other living creature, has only a limited life and must in time be replaced. The book mentions places in Switzerland where certain plants, which fifty years ago were common, have now become very rare or have completely disappeared owing to picking of the flowers year after year by children and increasing numbers of tourists.

H.G.W.

“MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD.” “What is mud?” asks Dr. Eugene Fubini, deputy director of research at the Pentagon. New Scientist, No. 392, 21st May, 1964, page 469, offers some conclusions from this side of the Atlantic. In strict scientific terms, mud may be described as dirt with dropsy, a half-way between terra firrna and mare nostrum, used for the construction of swamps, quagmires and morasses and as an indicator of activity on building sites. But how many different kinds of mud are there? There is Original Mud, our beginning and our end, the goo that gave the first organisms a toe-hold to climb up out of the primaeval soup. There is Mud the Obliterator, splashing, creeping and getting walked into the house; is this the one with which Y.R.C. wives are so familiar, or is it rather Mud the Beautifier, the only type to which a woman will passively submit? Or perhaps Mud the Playmate: provided that only his clothes are spotless and his shoes brand new, any toddler left out of sight in high summer after seven weeks of drought can be guaranteed to return inside five minutes plastered with new-made mud.

Compared with these forms, the common Military Mud, in which tanks get bogged down and infantrymen wallow, and in which Dr. Fubini is doubtless most interested, is but a simple Ihing.

H.G.W.