WHEN YOU correspond regularly with amateur scientists, you get used to having strange things arrive at your door. Several weeks ago, for instance, a package came just before dinner with a note reading, "Here's that old dead fish I promised you. Cordially, Bernie."

It was from Bernard Powell, a professional science writer and enthusiastic amateur paleontologist who lives in Riverside, Conn. We had asked him to give us some details on the coelacanth, recently netted off the coast of South Africa, and he had replied:

"The African coelacanth is a clumsy looking fish about five feet long weighing 100 pounds. A peculiar lobe projects from its tail, and its fins extend from the ends of fleshy leglike lobes. Evolutionists believe that coelacanths are descended from the same group of fishes that gave rise to the first land vertebrates. Coelacanths first appeared 300 million years ago. Because no coelacanth fossils have been found in rocks younger than those of the Cretaceous period, the fish was believed to have been extinct for at least 75 million years. That is why the capture of this 'living fossil' has stirred up so much interest among paleontologists.

"Incidentally, I have dug up a lot of coelacanth fossils near the New Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge. Mine are much smaller than the African species. They belong to a form called Diplurus newarkii, which was common in the last part of the Triassic period about 170 million years ago. I'll send one along for your curio shelf."

The "dead fish" we received in the mail from Powell is embedded in a matrix of shale about four inches square. It includes only the head [see photograph at right]. In daylight the fossil might easily be overlooked, because it is in shallow relief and matches the color of the shale. Oblique light, however, brings out an amazing richness of detail. The slab holds a number of small fossils besides the coelacanth. The curved lines in the upper right of the picture are fish bones, perhaps from another specimen. Some of the pinhead bumps and depressions were made by small crustaceans called ostracods. Other fossils, many of exquisite pattern, show under the microscope. A single small flake chipped from the slate matrix holds enough fossil material to keep a microscopist busy for hours.

After one evening with Powell's gift, we had to know more about amateur paleontology. We asked him to tell us how he had happened to take it up, how the amateur goes about hunting fossils and what he does with them.

"When you are born in Colorado and are raised by a father who enjoys vacationing all over the Southwest with his family," wrote Powell, "you acquire a taste for geology and paleontology along with your first oatmeal. Out there you can't ignore the earth. Only a blind or unimaginative person could look down into the Grand Canyon, for example, without wondering how it got that way. I saw the Canyon first when I was 10 years old. From that trip I took home a pocketful of pretty rocks which started my collection.

"If you make a habit of picking up rocks-particularly if you gather them over a wide area-the chances are good that some contain fossils, although you may not recognize them as such at first. Later you learn how to spot areas likely to be rich in fossils and how to interpret them in relation to the history of life.

"Essentially paleontology involves the study of ancient animals and plants. Carl O. Dunbar, professor of paleontology at Yale, likes to quote the collector who said, 'If it stinks, the remains belong to zoology; if not, to paleontology.' Paleontology makes its strongest appeal to those who have a natural interest in the biological sciences and in evolution; fossils are also of interest to amateurs in geology and petrology.

"How do you find fossils? Any hunter will admit that luck accounts for part of his success, but a knowledge of the woods and the game helps. The rule holds equally for fossil hunters. Some rocks are full of fossils and others are sterile. It therefore pays a novice in paleontology to do some preliminary studying. With a book like Dunbar's Historical Geology and a little firsthand observation it is relatively easy to identify the major systems of rocks.

"With rare exceptions fossils are found only in rocks of sedimentary origin. As the texts explain, sedimentary rocks are formed largely from the mud and ooze o ancient seas. Successive downwarping and uplifting of the earth's crust, with attendant flooding, drying and chemical alteration under great pressure, have built up many layers of sedimentary rock in some locations. The U.S. Midwest is a good example. Other regions appear never to have been flooded. These are covered by rocks of igneous origin which, with rare exceptions, contain no fossils. Nor do metamorphic rocks-those of sedimentary origin which have been drastically modified by heat, pressure and chemical change-for the changes have largely destroyed their fossil record. A beginner is wise to dig first in outcrops of sedimentary rocks. Even where the strata are hopelessly entangled and out of order because of folding or erosion, the sedimentary layers can be identified and dated by 'key' or index fossils. To collect a set of these-comprising at least one specimen from each geological period-is a challenging project.

"The key fossils and rock layers with which they are associated, together with the geological time scale and related data, have been listed in a table of geologic periods which appears in all good reference texts. The few minutes required for memorizing it will be repaid many times in hours saved during field trips. Also, a lot of shoe leather can be conserved by using the special maps published by state geological surveys. Some of these maps are available through the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Geology and paleontology have developed extensive taxonomies. Their terms, derived from Latin and Greek, frighten some laymen and have inspired the comment, perhaps with the desert prospector in mind, that the earth sciences specialize in the production of lofty words and lowly bums. It is not necessary to learn all the words, but it helps to know a few. They come in handy when the amateur approaches local museums and colleges for advice on likely sites and what to look for in them.

"In the northeastern U. S. good sites include rock quarries, road cuts, building constructions and similar projects where large-scale excavation is under way. The same is true in the Midwest, where a railroad cut may unearth scores of different species within a few hundred feet. Small streams in New York and New England frequently uncover interesting specimens. One of the largest mastodon fossils ever recovered was spotted by a small boy fishing for brook trout.

"Most of my coelacanths have been taken from an abandoned quarry at North Bergen, N. J. I had learned from general reading that coelacanth fish fossils in our vicinity are found in shales of the Triassic period, particularly in the Stockton formation of the Newark series. A geological map disclosed a prominent outcrop of the Stockton formation just west of the famous Palisades of the Hudson River, opposite the north end of Manhattan Island.

"At six o'clock one Sunday morning, armed with the map and digging gear, I picked up Bob Hurst, a fellow amateur, and our girl friends and headed for this area. It turned out to be occupied by a built-up suburban community, and we were on the verge of giving up when one of the girls spotted the abandoned quarry. It was serving as the city garbage dump, half covered with smoldering rubbish, but we held our noses and waded in. Within minutes we located the Stockton formation. The first stroke of my hammer dislodged a beautiful coelacanth with scarcely a bone out of place!

"This was the first of many visits to the quarry. When fish die they tend to settle to the bottom on their sides. During fossilization they are squeezed to paper thinness and hence become a two-dimensional representation of the specimen. By assembling a collection of coelacanths fossilized in all possible positions, I hoped to acquire a guide for building up a mental picture of the fish in three dimensions and, perhaps, to construct an actual model of it.

"While I was working on this project in the summer of 1952, a chance event introduced me to fossils of another kind. Someone told me that the black shales of the Connecticut River Valley were rich in coelacanths. We drove up there one week end for a look. After poking around in several highway cuts, we finally settled down for a close examination of a trap-rock quarry in the vicinity of Middletown, Conn. About an hour later an old quarryman strolled over and asked what we were looking for. We told him that we were trying to locate the contact zone between the trap rock and the black shale beneath, and that we were hunting for fish fossils. He informed us that he had never found a fossil in any zone at that location but asked whether we would be interested in looking at some fossilized bird tracks nearby. He said they had been made by prehistoric birds, many times larger than an ostrich, and that some of the prints were a good six inches across.

"I was puzzled for a moment, but then remembered the celebrated dinosaur tracks of the Valley and knew what he was talking about. The naturalist Edward Hitchcock who first described such tracks in 1836, wrote: 'I do not doubt that these tracks were made by birds that were genetically different.' Hitchcock's bad guess appears to survive the passage of time almost as well as the fossils to which it refers.

"We followed the quarryman's instructions and arrived in a few minutes at the corner of a rather large and rolling pasture. A semi-open pit had been quarried back into a ledge of red sandstone, a prominent feature of the Triassic system in this region. An area roughly the size of a large living room had been cleared out. The floor of the pit slanted gently to the west. Rock had been removed to a depth of about six feet for the construction of a small dam in a nearby stream. The floor of the pit was literally covered with huge 'bird tracks.'

"What we did about those tracks illustrates in general what amateurs do when they find fossils of this type. We drove the 15 miles home and returned shortly with equipment for making casts of the tracks. Six different kinds were visible. We selected four of the best for copying. These were first cleaned out with a whisk broom and then thoroughly rubbed with tincture of green soap to prevent our plaster cast from sticking. (Subsequent experiments proved that floor wax of the paste type works better than soap and that a silicone mold release is better still.) Next we constructed a simple cardboard retaining frame, using Scotch tape to hold the corners, and placed it around the track. We then sifted plaster of Paris through our fingers and into a bowl of water. This method of mixing prevents lumps. We had to work quickly, because the plaster sets in a matter of minutes The mixing bowl was jounced on the ground a few times to bring the bubbles to the top, for bubbles can mar the cast.

"If the mix is of the proper consistency, it can be poured directly into the mold, although some prefer to smear a light coat over the specimen and work it in by hand to assure perfect contact. The balance is then added. Plaster does not have much strength, so after pouring about half of the mix I embedded a sheet of hardware cloth into the mold to serve as reinforcement. A considerable amount of heat was released by the reaction as the plaster cured. After cooling, the cast was removed, and it proved to be a faithful negative of the fossil. The three remaining tracks were copied similarly. After drying in a protected place for several days, the negative molds were given a coat of thin shellac and used for making positive casts by the same method.

"Recently I have been making negative molds out of latex rubber, which is simpler to work with than plaster. Being flexible, it is easy to strip from the fossil and from the subsequent positive casts. It requires no separator, and it copies projections and undercut shapes from which a plaster cast could not be freed without breaking. The thick liquid latex is applied to the surface with a brush. A drying interval must be allowed between coats, and this is the principal disadvantage of the process. It takes about eight hours on a good drying day to build up and cure a latex mold. Dealers in artists' supplies now offer a vinyl plastic material which is said to be easier and quicker to use than either plaster or latex, but I have had no experience with it.

"For complete realism it is desirable to copy the color as well as the texture of the fossil and its matrix. I always take a small chip from the matrix as a color guide. The match is made by mixing oxide pigments with the molding material. Some of the oxides tend to fade with time, and I am still experimenting with combinations of them. The problem is more complex when the color of the fossil differs from that of the matrix. I make reproductions of this type in the form of inlays, first filling the fossil portion of the mold with plaster of matching color. As it begins to set, I add plaster colored to match the matrix. It is a tricky job. If the matrix material is poured too soon, it mixes with that of the fossil and botches the copy. On the other hand, if the fossil portion sets completely before the second coat is applied, the two may separate later at the zone of contact.

"I always include a descriptive legend as a part of the cast. It costs little to have a printer set up the pertinent information -what, where and when-in the form of a linotype slug. This is scarfed into the mold. The result is a neat label, integral with the casting.

"To protect the edges of the plaster I mount each reproduction in a simple wooden frame and paste a short, illustrated description on the back. This legend includes the scientific name of the specimen presumably responsible for the track, its size and its significance, both with respect to the geological period in which it lived and its place in the scheme of evolution.

"Finding the fossil and carting it home marks the completion of only the first phase in the amateur paleontologist's hobby. The second consists in preparing the specimen for study and display. For maximum interest and scientific value the organism should be readily distinguishable from its matrix. The preparation and mounting of specimens often calls for all the ingenuity the amateur can summon. Fossils have been called nature's puzzles, and each type poses unique problems. Shells retrieved from formations of friable substances, such as chalk beds, clean easily with the aid of an orange stick and a soft brush. Some fossils, such as trilobites, can often be separated from the matrix because they differ from it chemically. If silica has replaced the organic substance of trilobites embedded in limestone, the fossils may be separated by dissolving the limestone in a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid. Another technique calls for sectioning the matrix with a diamond-edged saw. The amateur then studies the slices in sequence and builds up a three-dimensional reconstruction of the fossil from the patterns that may be discerned in the series of slabs.

"Perhaps the most difficult are those which show only as a faint relief in the matrix. My coelacanth collection is of this type. The structure of the fish is developed by cutting back the shale. This operation may have a painful ending for an amateur. A curator at the American Museum of Natural History once told me that I had found one of the best preserved coelacanths of its type ever recovered but deflated my pride by adding: 'Unfortunately you have defaced it by cutting off the most interesting part of its tail. I had mistaken the characteristic tail projection for a scrap of rubbish! [See photograph above left]. The amateur is advised to submit his finds for expert appraisal if there is the least chance that his handling of them may detract from their scientific value.

"Some of my friends question whether paleontology is worth all the fuss and bother. An ardent dry-fly fisherman who recently examined the dinosaur tracks asked: 'Where's the fun in this? If you like fossils, why not visit a museum?' I couldn't help asking why he didn't buy his trout from a fish peddler? Paleontology gives added point to our hikes in summer and poses endless challenges at the workbench in winter. When you collect fossils you are gathering bits of information about some of the earth's great dramas.

"I get a kick out of putting my feet on the exact spot where a giant reptile plodded 170 million years ago. I try to imagine how the valley and the bordering mountains looked then-the hot, red sands over which the creature tramped in its search for food, the downpour that drenched the animal and left splatter marks in its tracks, the struggles between strange and wonderful beasts still marked in the valley's prehistoric mud.

"As my fisherman friend says, the story of our valley can be found under glass in any good museum. But it comes to life only when you go forth to meet the ancient creatures in the field."

THE SINTAR lens made by William M. Sinton, which was described in the December issue, is a simple, homemade hemisphere of glass, installed in a homemade metal mount. When substituted for the regular lens in a camera it yields wide-angle photographs ludicrously distorting the immediate foreground. In the top photograph on the next page a pipe in Sinton's mouth is distorted to three times the width of its nearby shadow. In the photograph at the bottom of the next page, taken from a balloon 300 feet up, the city of Baltimore appears to be wrapped around a miniature planet because of the excessive curvature of field of this freak lens.

I made several of the Sintar lens hemispheres, including one about half an inch in diameter, which is the right size for a Leica camera, and another about an inch in diameter for a camera making pictures 2-1/4 by 3-1/4 inches. Even a person without glass-grinding experience or knowledge of optics can design and build a Sintar for his own camera. The hemispherical lens part is so easy-much easier than making a telescope mirror-that an uncommonly intelligent chimpanzee could accomplish it. I found it a fascinating exercise requiring no concentration.

First saw out a cube of glass, making it big enough to allow for grinding off. Next grind the cube freehand to a rough sphere. Then, on a homemade bow-drill spindle, you can smooth and reduce the sphere to the final uniform diameter. On the same spindle you polish the sphere with rouge against felt or pitch. Finally you grind off one hemisphere and polish the flat face of the remaining hemisphere.

For a novice at optical work all this may occupy six evenings, including the time consumed in the make-ready, which amateur optical workers no more count as time wasted than a woman counts the hours spent in the pleasurable indoor sport of dressing. John R. Haviland, an advanced amateur optical worker, truthfully wrote in one of the Amateur Telescope Making books: "For what is a hobby, if not to murder time-every moment of which is enjoyable." With the experience gained on the first hemisphere a second can be made in two evenings, a third in two hours.

As was stated in the December issue, the formula for finding the size of the lens for a given camera is:

R is the radius of the new lens, n is the index of refraction of the glass used (1.525 for a typical plate glass), and d is the distance between the film in the camera and the flat face of the hemisphere. This distance is derived from the equation where w is the crosswise dimension of the film. Since the lens is already heavily involved in distortion, we may safely round off the 1.525 to 1.5. Substituting and solving for R, the answer is .228 and the diameter is .456 inch. This decimal fraction is easy to measure with a micrometer caliper while grinding the sphere, but a vernier or even a simple caliper and the common fraction 29/64 inch should be sufficiently accurate.

I began with a very irregular piece of plate glass trimmed down from a fragment of my first telescope mirror, which I made in 1926 and which was knocked off my desk by an office charwoman (no more careless than I). "Sorry," she apologized, "I broke your paperweight." If you have no collection of scrap glass you can obtain from the Edmund Scientific Corporation of Barrington, N. J. two cubes (one as a spare) of BSC-2 glass for a dollar. When ordering, get a cube which will give at least 1/16 of an inch leeway on all sides for grinding losses in reducing it to the sphere called for by the formula. The index of refraction of BSC-2 glass is 1.517. The grinding abrasives needed are one-pound cans each of No. 80, 280 and 600 silicon carbide grains, respectively table-salt size, medium size and fine dust size. The abrasives are obtainable from the Carborundum Company (trade name Carborundum), Niagara Falls, N. Y., from the Norton Company (Crystolon), Worcester, Mass., pr from local dealers.

Before beginning work, cover the bench or table deeply with newspapers. If you plan to cut out your own blank instead of buying one, a suitable method of sawing it out is to fix the glass between wooden stopblocks nailed to a board, arrange two nails as guides for the saw, invert the blade of a hacksaw, dump a handful of No. 80 grains in a saucer of water, place a spoonful of wet grains at the side of the blade and, while keeping the saw moving with one hand, poke grains into the space between the toothless blade and the glass with the other, using a stick or screwdriver. As fast as the grating noise diminishes, poke in more grains. Make opposite cuts part way through the glass, hold the glass in the hand and knock off the end with a small tool. Do not bother to saw out an accurate shape, for you will be able to grind off fairly large irregularities faster than they can be sawed off.

For roughing out the sphere, the simplest of several setups I tried proved the most efficient. I used a common dinner plate (if not common, it soon will be). Ladle into it a heaping teaspoonful of No. 80 grains and several teaspoons of water, and grind the glass against the grains in small circles, progressing around the plate in epicycles to exploit all the grains. The sides of the plate sufficiently confine the abrasive, yet they are so low-and this is important-as not to interfere with the vigorous use of the hands. With this setup you can grind off glass at the rate of a cubic inch per hour, provided you stand up, use both hands and put your back into it. The grinding accomplished is proportional to the distance traversed and the pressure maintained.

After 10 minutes the water will be milky with ground glass particles and the grains will be broken down. Rinse off the plate in a deep bucket of water in which the grains will sink to the bottom and not scratch the glass later on. Do all the rinsing in this bucket. Grains rinsed at a sink tap will lodge in the plumbing. A good optical worker keeps abrasives in their place, taking care not to get them on the floor, tool handles, his clothes or his hair. Strive prodigiously to be the first optical worker in human history to learn this by precept instead of by sad experience.

The first half-hour of grinding a shapeless blank is dull work. But it becomes increasingly interesting as the semblance of a sphere begins to emerge and your freehand skill becomes involved. At this early stage you are not aiming at the final diameter but only at bringing all diameters within 1/16 of an inch of equality. At that point, or even before it, you could transfer the glass from the dinner plate to the grinding spindle. But you may discover a challenge, as I did, to see how much closer to the final sphere dimensions you can get by freehand grinding on the plate. If you can bring it as close as 1/64 inch on all diameters, you will have something to be proud of. There is a childlike fascination in making these Sintar spheres.

Next come the smoothing of the sphere, its reduction to the accurate diameter and the polishing. John M. Pierce of Springfield, Vt., supplied one of his little belt-driven lens-making spindles but suggested that I try first the primitive, hand-driven bow-drill. The one shown in Roger Hayward's drawing was thrown together in 30 minutes from scrap wood, with a total expenditure of 10 cents for an inch of 7/16-inch (outside diameter) brass tubing. Any soft metal in any diameter between one half and two thirds that of the glass will do.

Loyal to Murphy's Second Law-build no mechanism simply if a way can be found to make it complex and wonderful -the ever-inventive amateur telescope maker can, may and probably will have fun equipping this homely grinder with sybaritic luxuries: bearings of metal instead of wood, seal rings to exclude abrasive grains from them, the use of oil instead of water for lubrication, a motor drive for the spindle. Another kind of fun is to ascertain how utterly simple a mechanism can be and still turn out fine work. Mayhap this is the only machine in the world that works better if poorly made. For example, if the hole bored into the end of the broomstick spindle for the grinding tube happens to be crooked, the tube will wobble, but then it will better distribute the grinding over the surface of the sphere.

In the December issue Sinton said he had had some trouble about the glass grinding lopsided. So I discarded the second grinding tube of the classic Chinese model which he had used; instead I held the glass against the lower tube by hand [see diagram above right]. I turned the glass frequently in random directions as the bow was fiddled, and occasionally dabbed it in wet abrasive grains. Instead of becoming lopsided, the glass automatically, even eagerly, sought exact sphericity. The operator's only contribution to the "skill" is to keep turning the glass; the good results are inherent in the geometry of the spindle. The end of the tube is a circle, and a circle is the only figure that will contact a sphere in all positions. The tube end grinds off the high spots on the glass wherever it is not yet spherical.

An even better technique than the one in the drawing is to scatter a teaspoonful of grains on the upper board of the grinder close to the spindle and keep the left wrist resting horizontally on the board. After each half-dozen strokes, the fingers let go the glass and dip into the abrasive to pick up some on the finger tips. The abrasive passes to the sphere and to the bearing, which is thus "lubricated" with abrasive! When the hole wears out of round, it is only a three minutes' job to bore a new hole, the supply of holes being unlimited. The first hole should outlast one Sintar, however.

No matter how proudly you looked on your freehand sculpturing skills, the spindle will deflate your pride within ten minutes as your bumps give way to true spherical curves. Something is wrong with you if you get no "charge" from watching the geometric sphere emerge. It gets rounder much faster than it gets smaller. At the No. 80 stage of the grinding it should approach within a hundredth of an inch of true sphericity. As you fiddle, the diameter of the sphere comes down about a hundredth of an inch in each 10-minute grinding spell. When it is about half of the distance to the final diameter, clean house, lay down fresh papers, wash every grain of the coarse abrasive from the bench and tools and turn the hose on the grinder.

Continue with No. 280 for half the remaining excess of diameter. Though there is no necessity for accuracy beyond what can be measured with a simple caliper, there is a challenge here to see how far you can push the precision. It is easy to reach three thousandths of an inch at the 280 stage. Then clean up again and change to No. 600. Grind until the final diameter is reached.

In grinding their mirrors telescope makers use six successive sizes of grains, but three sizes will work well here because a spindle runs rapidly and because the unit pressures are higher on this small work.

To polish the sphere you will need a new spindle, a sketch of which is shown at the bottom of the illustration on the preceding page. Remove the brass tube, cut a one-inch circle of felt from your best soft hat and rub the dry glass in a sprinkling of rouge-which this magazine will supply on receipt of a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Fiddle until the surface of the sphere is free of all tiny pits when you look at it under a magnifier. If you choose pitch instead of felt for polishing, enlarge the conical depression in the spindle, melt the pitch in a spoon, pour it into the depression in the spindle, let it half cool, wet it with rouge cream and then fiddle. This will give a superior polish. The polishing does not reduce the diameter of the glass enough to worry about.

When your sphere is finished, buy some glass marbles at a toy store and gloat over the wide margin by which you excelled them in roundness, as measured with a micrometer caliper.

After admiring your handiwork, roll the sphere in a small puddle of melted paraffin wax, which will give it an overcoat to protect it from scratches. Now you must grind the sphere down to a hemisphere. Grind off nine tenths of the excess hemisphere on the dinner plate, using No. 80 grains. Chamfer the edge to forestall edge flaking due to pressure. Then change to 280 and later to 600 watching the thickness to approach the half-diameter point without passing it.

Polish the flat face on felt laid on a flat surface and dry-rouged. If you prefer a pitch polish, pour a four-inch puddle of melted pitch on a flat surface and press it thin (1/3 of an inch) and flat with a piece of glass heavily smeared with rouge cream. Shift this glass frequently to prevent it from sticking. When the pitch is cool, wet the glass with rouge cream, weight it with a book and leave it an hour to "cold press" flat. Add more rouge cream and stroke the hemisphere against this lap until its pits are gone. Because the area is so small and the unit pressures therefore relatively great, this will require far less time than a telescope mirror. No special precautions need be taken to render optically flat the tiny part used in the f/32 diaphragm opening.

The technique for sawing out the disk of glass for the front element is the same as for making straight saw cuts, except that you use a toothless saw-a ring of thin metal (cookie cutter) rotated by a bow drill, hand drill or drill press.

Designing and making the metal lens mount for your camera is a separate project which you must work out yourself. No blueprints are available.

Bibliography

HANDBOOK OF PALEONTOEOGY FOR BEGINNERS AND AMATEURS. W. Goldring. New York State Museum, Part 1, 1929; Part 2,1931.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF FOSSILS. Hervey Woodburn Shimer. The Macmillan Company, 1933.

AMATEUR TELESCOPE MAKING. Edited by Albert G. Ingalls. Scientific American, Inc., 1952.

AMATEUR TELESCOPE MAKING-ADVANCED. Edited by Albert G. Ingalls. Scientific American, Inc., 1952.

AMATEUR TELESCOPE MAKING-BOOK THREE. Edited by Albert G. Ingalls. Scientific American, Inc., 1953.

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