September 17, 1938

Mr. James S. Thompson

McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.

330 West 42nd Street

New York, N.Y.

After reading Rice's manuscript, I have formed the following opinion of it.

The field covered is an interesting and important one, and the author is an able man, familiar with the field. It is my opinion, however, that his treatment of the physical basis of valence theory, given in the first ten chapters (206 pages), is not satisfactory, for reasons given in the following paragraph. The remaining chapters, XI to XIX (355 pages), are, I believe, more satisfactory.

In the first ten chapters the author attempts to cover a very wide and difficult field. He does not adopt a consistent point of view, his treatment being in part too mathematical and in part too elementary. There is no consecutive development of any theory or subject; arguments are based almost at random on classical theory, old quantum theory, and quantum mechanics. The author has shown ingenuity in his discussion of wave mechanics without the Schrödinger wave equation; this discussion is very arbitrary, however, and I fear that no reader would follow it or get a correct picture of quantum mechanics from it. Moreover, the treatment is not consistent; for example, the important argument on page 179 involves the properties of the wave equation, introduced here without discussion. The reader would surely be lost here.

It seems likely that the manuscript could be made the basis of a satisfactory course taught by Dr. Rice himself, but that another teacher, without his ability and knowledge, would have difficulty with it. I doubt that minor revisions of the first ten chapters would change the situation. These chapters might be completely rewritten to give them greater unity, consecutiveness, and clarity. Or it might be possible for the author to replace them by a briefer treatment covering only the material needed as the basis for the succeeding chapters, omitting elementary topics which the reader might be expected to know (such as Chapters I and II) and advanced topics which are not essential to the later chapters (wave mechanical calculations, etc.)

Chapters XI to XIX seem to me to be good in general. They are marred by occasional lack of clarity and by errors in fact and in English. I enclose an incomplete list of suggested changes (in addition many obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected in the manuscript). These chapters need to be gone over carefully before printing.

I am returning the manuscript separately. I would be glad to discuss it further with you, if you desire.

Yours truly,

Linus Pauling

LP/bcs