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just ignored them and went on writing books expanding Ms central thesis.’ In a rare attempt at self-defence” he stated that he hoped that future generations of scientists would understand his work more dearly. He wrote off his contemporary critics, and this prompted Martin Gardner to observe in 1952 that: Dr Velikovsky is an almost perfect textbook example of the pseudoscientist - self-taught in the subjects about which he does most of his speculation, working in total isolation from fellow scientists, motivated by a strong compulsion to defend dogmas held for other than scientific reasons, and with an unshakable conviction in the revolutionary value of his work and the blind- ness of his critics. One of the favourite points of the anti-Velikovsky critics was that he relied upon ancient myths and traditions for his evidence. Actually, in Worlds in Collision, he devoted many pages to this problem. Since he was trying to reassemble events which transpired in prehistoric times (before the advent of written records), he was obliged to perform a comparative study of early legends. He recognized that the problem of interpreting such material correctly was monumental. ‘Traditions about upheavals and catastrophes, found among all peoples,* he wrote, 'are generally discredited because of the shortsighted belief that no forces could have shaped the world in the' past that are not at work also at the present time, a belief that is the very foundation of modern geology and of the theory of evolution.’ Those were fighting words to the scientific establishment. Velikovsky compounded his felony by suggesting that numerous events and catastrophes long accepted in religious lore as miracles and acts of God were in reality observations of astronomical phenomena which could be explained. This was totally unpalatable to the scientific community and to many others as well. In 1950 the staid American Journal of Stience ranted that Vel-Ikovsky's book was 'best described as burlesque of both science and history’. Seventeen years later Yale Scientific Magazine devoted an entire issue to vindicating the good doctor. What had happened in those seventeen years? For one thing, the Old Guard had changed to a degree, and many bright young men had emerged, clutching their slide rules as they rode the tails of man-made comets to Venus and Mars. For another, the stupefying and stultifying atmosphere of the McCarthy Era of the early 1950s had ended. Professor Lloyd Motz of Columbia University scented the tide of change, and in a letter in Harper's in October 1963. he cautiously admitted, 'I do not support Velikovsky's theory, but I do support his right to present his ideas and to have those ideas considered by responsible scholars and scientists as the creation of a serious and dedicated investigator and not the concoctions of a charlatan seeking notoriety...' Scientists and professors live in the uncomfortable atmosphere of the academic rule, Publish or Perish. They grind out interminable research papers and studies, not because they have ' Among these are: Earth in Upheaval, Ages in Chaos, and Oedipus and Akhnatnn. Harper's. June 1951.