184 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



and point out ways in which the patterns of knowledge may be fruit- 

 fully extended or enriched if our national scientific effort is to be 

 more than pedestrian. 



The place of imagination in science was emphasized by Francis 

 Bacon in the Novum Organum : 



Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogi- 

 matical. The former, like ants, only heap up and use their store ; the latter, like 

 spiders, spin out their own webs. The bee, the mean of both, extracts matter 

 from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its 

 own efforts. The true labor of philosophy resembles her, for it neither relies 

 entirely or principally on the powers of the mind nor yet lays up in the memory 

 the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history or mechanics in the 

 raw state, l)ut changes and works it in the understanding. [The italics are 

 mine.— R. E. G.] 



Bacon's contributions to the techniques of acquiring knowledge arose 

 from his realization that in matters relating to problems of fact the 

 function of the mind is one of transmutation. Ideas culled from one 

 set of experiences may be digested by the mind, transformed, and ap- 

 plied with creative results to problems presented by another set of 

 experiences. In the isolated mind, ideas are neither created nor 

 destroyed. 



The history of science is full of illuminating examples; I shall 

 mention one to illustrate a point I wish to make. In the last half of 

 the nineteenth century, organic chemistry was changed from an un- 

 wieldy collection of facts into an esthetically satisfying science by the 

 systematic application of a few hypotheses concerning the nature of the 

 carbon atom, its valency, and its ability to join with itself and other 

 atoms to form geometric structures. The name of August Kekule 

 is permanently associated with this major scientific advance. In early 

 life, Kekule set out to be an architect and studied this subject at the 

 University of Giessen. Under Liebig's influence, he became interested 

 in organic chemistry, but instead of following the usual routine of 

 student, assistant, privat docent^ and so forth, at Giessen, he left the 

 University after finishing his course and wandered around the scien- 

 tific centers in Paris and London. Here he met the foremost thinkers 

 of his time and, to quote his own words: "Originaly a pupil of 

 Liebig, I had become a pupil of Dumas, Gerhardt, and Williamson. 

 I no longer belonged to any school." Kekule's reveries on top of a 

 London bus or before the fire in his study at Ghent are well known. 

 In these dreams, the ideas of form and structure, gathered from his 

 experience as an architect, were interwoven with the ideas and prob- 

 lems arising in his chemical studies. He saw atoms dance before 

 his eyes, arranging themselves in structures and manifold conforma- 

 tions. He awoke and spent the night writing down the substance of 

 his reveries. This was the beginning of the theory of the structure 



