AN 1850 PREVIEW OF "WORLDS IN
COLLISION"
by CARL WITTKE
Professor of History and Dean of the
Graduate School,
Western Reserve University
Worlds in Collision, by Immanuel Velikovsky, is still on the
best seller lists. The book, written by
a Russian-born physician and
Bible student who explored the sciences
from medicine and law to
psychoanalysis in many European centers
of learning, continues to
be the storm center of one of the
liveliest controversies that has
ever shaken the scientific and
publishing world. Is the book, in
spite of the author's reported ten years
of laborious research, a
gigantic hoax on historians and
scientists, or is it to be accepted
as a serious challenge to Newton and
Darwin?
This extraordinary volume was hailed by
an unusual amount
of publicity in publications like Harper's
and Colliers; it was sum-
marized in the Reader's Digest in
advance of publication by the
author of The Greatest Story Ever
Told; and the science editor
of the New York Herald Tribune endorsed
it as a "magnificent
piece of scholarly research."
Clifton Fadiman, expert of "Informa-
tion, Please," concluded that the
book "may well turn out to be
as epochal" as the work of Newton
and Darwin. Despite such
fanfare, however, the Macmillan Company,
original publisher of
Velikovsky's treatise, relinquished its
publishing rights to Double-
day. One can only wonder what went on
behind closed doors during
the editorial conference that ended in
the transfer of a best seller
to a competitor, but it is generally
assumed that the extraordinary
decision was prompted by the pressure of
many distinguished Mac-
millan authors who resented having their
scholarly and scientific
books appear in such strange company.
The whole transaction, in-
cidentally, raises the issue of
censorship in a new form, and this
time in reverse, for in this case it was
not a profit-conscious cor-
poration which interfered with freedom
of expression, but a group
of scholars who apparently challenged a
publisher's right to print
either scientific facts or intellectual
rubbish. Presumably every book
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