Dr. G. W. Wheland

c/o Professor Lennard-Jones

The University of Cambridge

England

Dear George:

I am afraid that I have delayed answering your letter, for various reasons, so long that this letter won’t catch up with you on your Continental tour. Accordingly I shall not waste much effort by making the letter long. I was glad to receive your long and interesting letters and especially to learn that you did not find Oxford nearly so satisfactory as a place to work as London or Cambridge. I told this to Broway, who however has not made any change in his plans, which are, however, elastic enough to permit him to transfer to some other place in case it seems worth while. During the last two or three months I haven been working reasonably hard on our book, and I think that the progress has been pretty satisfactory. At any rate, I am better satisfied with the way it is developing that I was before. I have rewritten Chapter II, which now has the title “The Quantum-Mechanical Treatment of the Electron Pair Bond”. It includes your section on the electron pair bond in the hydrogen molecule followed by a very detailed treatment of the formulation of a wave function representing a valence bond structure of a molecule, and then by discussions of partial ionic character, hybridization, the structure of methane and other molecules containing single bonds, the double bond, and the triple bond. This chapter accordingly now includes practically all of the material previously put in Chapter 5. My idea in part was to include in this chapter everything up to resonance and for the rest of the book to be devoted essentially to resonance. I am beginning to revise and make additions to Chapters III and IV, and then I plan to get busy on the rest of the book. There is no chance, of course, of getting it finished before the end of summer, but I shall continue working on it in the fall, and it ought to go fast because Jack Sherman is now helping me, and will go to Cornell with me too.

We are having a good time in the laboratory this summer. Zachariasen is here from Chicago and Ketelaar from Leyden, and Sidgwick is to come next Monday for a ten day visit. The work on the four new buildings is progressing rapidly, the chemistry building being now up to the third story. Both Brockway and Stitt will leave here August 15, Stitt going to Harvard with Wilson during the tenure of his National Research Fellowship, Bauer is carrying on his research on boron compounds during the summer and will probably leave for Chicago in the fall, having not found a satisfactory job for next year.

I don’t know whether you knew that we were expecting a baby or not. This expectation was of course responsible in part for my delay in getting to work on our manuscript—at least it makes a good excuse. The baby, a boy named Edward Crellin Pauling, was born on June 4, weighing 9 pounds 4 ounces. He is now getting along very well.

With best regards to Mrs. Wheland, and the hope that you and she are both enjoying your travels, I am

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling