WOMAN SCIENTIST.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 43, 18 January 1935, Page 11

WOMAN SCIENTIST.

A BUSY LIFE. A visiting American natural scientist in Moscow has described Madame Eugenia Alexandrovna Tolmacheva as the “Minister Plenipotentiary” of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, because this CO-ycar-old daughter of a famous father finds time apart from her own scientific work to look after most of the foreign scientists visiting the Soviet Union. In the course of a day’s work, this remarkable woman expends the energy of a dozen ordinary persons, and emerges unruffled and serene. Madame Tolmacheva lias lived among scientists all her life. Her father, A. P. Karpinsky, is president of the Academy .of Sciences at the age of 87, and has been world famous as a geologist. She has two sons, one of whom is now chairman of the polar commission of the academy and the other a radiologist. For the past 10 years she

has been chiefly interested in siesmology, and has published about 50 books and pamphlets on the subject. At present she is compiling a manual on seismic service in the Soviet Union. Madame Tolmacheva receives an average of about 50 callers each day as her father’s secretary, and often assists him in his research work. Familiar with 16 languages, she directs the foreign correspondence' of the academy, translates many scientific articles from and .into Russian, frequently represents the academy at diplomatic functions and supervises the entertainment of foreign visitors. But this work does not entirely fill her day. She looks after her own home, and is more pleased by favourable comment upon her special way of making tea than upon one of her scientific treatises. She rarely fails to find some time each, day for her little grandson, in whose education she is particularly interested. And as a hobby she has music. When she has a few moments to herself she‘plays the piano, and welcomes occasional free evenings when she can attend the opera or concerts. Madame Tolmacheva, as the daughter of an eminent scientist, moved in court circles in old St. Petersburg but she and her family moved as easily through the new society created by the Soviets. During a period when the Soviet Government was encouraging narrow specialisation, the diversity of this scientific family’s interests has been a significant commentary. Starting as a young woman with the study of geology, Madame Tolmacheva next turned to geochemistry and then to soil science. She became curator of the Dokucheav Museum of Soils before the revolution, and was the only woman among the delegates attending t%e International Congress on Soils at Rome in 1915. At the age of 50 she began the work on seismology which has occupied her for a decade.