A Course of Faraday

Abstract

NATURE is no longer merely “a weekly journal of science” but now both looks after our literary p's and q's and often is full of humour. This is right and proper. We have only to think what science would be, if, for example, we took seriously imperious dismissals of the ether, such as we are favoured with by a high official of the Royal Society. The delightful way in which other guardians of cosmic theory agree to differ is worthy of the best traditions of the House of Commons, if not of the Geological Society in its most palmy disputatious days. We still need, however, to introduce some sense of the ridiculous into chemistry. The reviewer (“Our Bookshelf”, March 14) is hard on the author of “Practical Forestry”, who, after asking, “Why is coal put between species of stone or rock?” replies, “Because the Almighty put it there, and no expert or scientist breathing will ever make the writer believe otherwise”. “Scientific truth” is stranger than such fiction. Physical chemists, biologists too, speak in just the same way of the teutonic myths they administer to unquestioning would-be graduates in science. What, indeed, is the professor for but to profess? His not to reason why, his but to do or die, at the hands of the examiner.