Day of a Scientist 163 



trying to free him from one of the traditional obligations 

 and privileges of scholarship. Furthermore, Bill had been 

 to medical school and even though he had gone directly into 

 chemistry without taking an internship and had forgotten 

 almost everything he ever knew about a stethoscope, he was 

 still sentimental about being a physician. As such, he took 

 rather seriously the passage in the Hippocratic Oath about 

 teaching the art to the sons of one's colleagues as if they 

 were one's own sons. 



Feeling this way, Bill had been glad to hear a few years 

 ago that the Rockefeller Institute, which for fifty years had 

 been devoted solely to research, had decided to obtain a 

 university charter and accept graduate students. In the face 

 of this it seemed a retrograde step to estabhsh new institutes 

 all over the country to take the best men away from univer- 

 sities. 



The lecture today went well. It was the first of a series 

 on aromatic or ring compounds, and Professor Stone always 

 enjoyed telling of how Kekule had arrived at his solution 

 of the structural problem posed by such substances as ben- 

 zene, phenol, and so on. Until his time, all the organic 

 structures known were open, chainlike molecules with at 

 least two or more ends. Kekule had been discussing the 

 problem with one of his friends on a visit to London, and 

 as he went home on the top of the omnibus, he had a vision 

 of atoms dancing about and holding hands. The dream 

 recurred over many years, and finally, as he sat dozing one 

 night in front of his fire, he began to see groups of atoms, 

 as he put it, "gambolling before my eyes. This time the 

 smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My 

 mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of 

 the kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of mani- 

 fold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely 

 fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like mo- 



