Haldane Devastated

Against a charge that he had stolen another man's ideas, made a book of them and sold it, the brilliant, hard-drinking Earl of Birkenhead defended himself last week with all the power and crushing erudition of a former Lord High Chancellor, of Britain.

The charge had been made with polite, scathing contempt by no less a personage than J. B. S. Haldane, famed Cambridge biochemist (TIME, March 29, 1926). In reviewing the Earl's latest best seller, The World in 2030, Mr. Haldane observed that a sort of mental telepathy must exist between his common head and the belted Earl's, since he recognized in no less than 44 passages ideas similar to the ones he had expressed in his essay of scientific prophecy Daedalus.

Example: Both Scientist Haldane and Lord Birkenhead feel that eventually the farmer will become extinct, driven off his land by great synthetic food factories which will make things to eat cheaper than they can be grown.

As any good lawyer would, Lord Birkenhead did not at once reply to Scientist Haldane's charges, took time to make a thorough study of his adversary, ended by finding his weak point. Moreover the Earl did not see why he should not make a good thing out of answering the charge of plagiarism. He made a good thing of it last week by selling his 3,000-word answer to the Daily Express which ballyhooed it as "exclusive."

In a devastating paragraph the whilom Lord High Chancellor revealed that Scientist Haldane is a man with a past, a past in which he once obscurely wrote these damning words: Any paper on pure science becomes the property of the whole world the moment it is published.

Obviously a man of that sort has no right to charge anybody with plagiarism, and the Earl of Birkenhead was at liberty to hand himself bouquets for writing a work of "pure science." Almost lost amid this sweet-smelling foliage was the passing admission that of course a number of Mr. Haldane's ideas were drawn upon. And was not the fellow handsomely rewarded? Did he not have his name mentioned in the Birkenhead book as one of those to whom the Earl is "indebted"?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.