Reading Scientific American is a different experience from reading other American magazines. The reader feels he is up against something formidably, though quite genially, solid. It is not only that science itself is factual, its effects enormous, and its establishment (comparatively) united. The impression the magazine gives of its subject field derives in part from its own structure, its mode of being, its style. It patrols such a large beat, the expanding sphere of human awareness, and it seems to be actually expanding that sphere itself. And yet one couldn't call it pompous. It is just consciously, but not self-consciously, big.