164 SCIENTIST 



tion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had 

 seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly 

 before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and 

 this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out 

 the consequences of the hypothesis." The hypothesis, of 

 course, was the ring structure of benzene which lies at the 

 base of all modern knowledge of "aromatic" organic com- 

 pounds. 



There is something gemutlich about this story, and Bill 

 thought that it helped at least some of the class to feel that 

 scientists are flesh-and-blood human beings who let their 

 minds drift off when they should be doing their homework. 

 The more sophisticated might also begin to grasp the role 

 of metaphor in the creative process. His humanities friends 

 at the faculty club always laughed when the physicists, who 

 talked about such things more than the biologists and chem- 

 ists, would say that the creativity of the scientist has much 

 in common with that of the poet. But Bill, who wouldn't 

 have said it himself, knew what they meant. 



Bill hadn't had much time for Hterature in college, but 

 a wise high school teacher had got him interested in Kipling 

 just at the time when KipHng's talents as a poet were being 

 obscured by hostihty to his imperialistic tone. When his 

 literary friends griped about science taking the warmth and 

 color out of life. Bill felt some of the indignation of the old 

 engineer M'Andrews when one of his lady passengers asked 

 him, "Mister M'Andrews, don't you think steam spoils ro- 

 mance at sea?" 



As soon as the lecture was over and Bill had answered 

 the questions of the three or four students who came down 

 to the lecture platform afterward, he went off to the labora- 

 tory of the professor of physiology, Nick Whittmore, for 

 two hours of laboratory work. About six months before, he 

 had been sitting next to Nick at a rather dreary dinner given 



