One usually thinks first of the well-known senior individuals who have been responsible for initiating one's career. My initial stimulus came, however, from the enthusiasm of a relatively unknown person. He was the headmaster of the tiny primary school I attended in a small village in Scotland at the outbreak of the 2nd World War. Knowing that education in Scotland was very classical: English and Mathematics, even Latin and Greek in those days, but no science to speak of, he understood, somehow, that this small boy was interested in science. He introduced me to the ideas of Wegener, Goethe, D'Arcy Thompson and Solly Zuckerman when I was nine years old, two of them, of course, not in the original.

As a result, I may be the only person in the world who knew about the movements of the continents but who did not know that Wegener's ideas were not accepted for almost half a century. By the time I reached university in 1952, the idea was center-stage as plate tectonics. I could not understand what all the excitement was about. I had always known it was so.

Likewise, I understood very well the idea that the skull was simply a series of fused vertebrae. It made sense to me. I did not know that Goethe had it wrong until I later came to read Gavin de Beer's tome on the vertebrate skull.