The Reviewer Replies

Abstract

As Goran tells it, the personal story on page 98 is incorrect compared with the account that Richard Willstitter gives in his autobiography, page 253. To cite and refute the wrong statements Goran makes about chemical equilibrium would far exceed the space allotted to a brief review; a reviewer who expands on explaining and citing widely known textbook material may perhaps avoid being denounced as haughty but risks being called condescending. The quotation from Paul Karrer's book does nothing to support Goran in writing that Hofmann initiated the coal-tar industry; the industrial coal-tar operation that Ernst Sell had initiated-one of several-produced the material which Hofmann analyzed. Here as elsewhere, Goran simplifies and condenses in an effort to write for a wide readership and ends in presenting an untrue picture. Goran seems unaware of this process when he distorts Karrer's remark into stating that methane is inert-and just when he deals with Haber's efforts to indicate the presence of explosive mixtures containing methane. I did not indicate typographical errors, of which there are several; I mentioned two examples of words wrongly spelled in text and index. With an interest in accuracy, the author would have searched for other examples; he would have been rewarded by finding, for instance, that Siemanns on page 159 should be Siemens. Goran has to take full responsibility for all these shortcomings, which include his personifying the Zeitgeist to write about a nineteenth-century-induced desire, or equating Jews with royalty in Germany on page 130; to help him understand and correct these shortcomings was one of the aims I hoped to reach with my review.