The graphical presentation of experimental data in the physical sciences has several advantages which today are too familiar to require very detailed enumeration. Its greatest strength lies in the clarity and succinctness with which it displays the information contained in tabulated results: for the experimenter a graph provides a rough and immediate check on the accuracy and suitability of the methods he is using, and for the reader of a scientific report it may convey in a few seconds information that could only be gleaned from a table of measurements by hours of close study. There are occasions where only the analysis of experimental graphs will provide the information we require, but usually the actual analysis of results is carried out nowadays by computational methods. The use of graphs is therefore not so much a necessary part of scientific procedure as an extremely useful one, and one that is often taken very much for granted.

The role of Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the natural history of creation in popularizing evolutionary ideas establishes it as a significant work in the history of science even though its intrinsic scientific value is not great. Its fascinating subject, a universally applicable developmental hypothesis, piqued the curiosity of the nineteenth-century reading public. The clientele to whom the book especially appealed was not too concerned with errors in fact and unsupported generalizations, but instead was attracted by the smoothness of its literary style and the glibness of its pronouncements. These same characteristics caused it to be an anathema to both scientists and clergymen, who joined together to voice their disapproval; they agreed that the ideas in it were potentially harmful to those untrained in scientific procedures and unaware of the book's inherent religious heresies.

In a recent paper on the origin of G. N. Lewis's concept of the shared electron pair bond, I argued that the sources of Lewis's novel conception were certain ideas of J. J. Thomson and Alfred Parson. Yet the only influence that Lewis explicitly acknowledged was neither of these, but Alfred Werner's. The following statement appears in his book, Valence (1923):

I still have poignant remembrance of the distress which I and many others suffered some thirty years ago in a class in elementary chemistry, where we were obliged to memorize structural formulae of a great number of inorganic compounds. Even such substances as the ferricyanides and ferryocyanides were forced into the system, and bonds were drawn between the several atoms to comply with certain artificial rules, regardless of all chemical evidence. Such formulae are now believed to be almost, if not entirely devoid of scientific significance. Such abuse of the structural formula inevitably led to a reaction which found its best expression in the publications of Werner. His Neuere Anschauungen … (1905) marked a new epoch in chemistry; and in attempting to clarify the fundamental ideas of valence, there is no work to which I feel so much personal indebtedness as to this of Werner's.