Ml 



Chapter Seven 

 OBSESSION 



Y illustrated monograph on the first Coelacanth appeared 

 in February 1940.* As I thumbed through the pages of the 

 first advance copy, my feelings were mixed. Pride in its achieve- 

 ment strove against the grim recollection of all it had cost. The 

 book certainly gave plenty of information. One scientific friend, 

 not an ichthyologist, remarked of it: 'Great Scott, if you could 

 write so much about only parts of a fish, what would you have 

 done with a whole one ?' Truly, all that work still lay ahead. 



War, war, war ! Scientific work, other than for war, declined 

 steadily. Who cared about fishes except as food for the forces? 

 My double life went steadily on, we had to train scientists so they 

 could make explosives to blast other men, but the proportion of 

 women in the University classes steadily rose. All this time my 

 Coelacanth monograph lay on my table, and my brain was con- 

 stantly obsessed by the problem. In 1944 the men began to re- 

 turn and life became more difl[icult than ever, with shortages of 

 staff, extra lessons, and vacation classes for returned servicemen. 



It became increasingly difficult to be enthusiastic about 

 hammering science into the heads of men who from all they had 

 endured in conflict could not but regard the academic life with 

 some scorn. After all, if you had been accustomed to soaring 

 through the skies in your own plane, to killing wherever you could, 

 and to daily narrow escapes from death, things like valency and 

 equivalent weight just couldn't mean a thing. 



Even in those dark days of war the fascination of fishes went on 

 biting more and more deeply into my soul, and by 1945 I came to 

 reaUse it could not be long before I cut loose from chemistry 

 somehow. I had not sufficient means to live without assistance 

 and could see no clear way. I had heard that the Prime Minister 

 had intervened to make life easier for a few prominent scientists, 



* In the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 1939- 



