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as well as by his, without any manner of difficulty or straining.’ The next week he brought in a candle, to show that, besides the flame and smoke, a continuous stream rose up from it, distinct from the air. Soon after, he showed another phenomenon in a bubble of soapy water, ‘which had neither reflection nor refraction and yet was diaphanous’. He observed it carefully: colours swirling and changing; bubbles blown about by the air. ‘It is pretty hard to imagine,’ Hooke told them, ‘what curious net or invisible body it is, that should keep the form of the bubble, or what kind of magnetism it is, that should keep the film of water from falling down.’ Really, it was hard to know anything at all.

2 M ARGARET A TWOOD
O F THE M ADNESS OF M AD S CIENTISTS : J ONATHAN S WIFT’S G RAND A CADEMY
    Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include
The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace
and
Oryx and Crake.
Her latest book is the novel
The Year of the Flood.
Her work has been published in more than forty languages.
    T HOSE EARLY F ELLOWS OF THE R OYAL S OCIETY WERE EARNEST SEEKERS AFTER TRUTH AND PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY . T HEY WERE ALSO, FOR SOME, FIGURES OF FUN AND – AS M ARGARET A TWOOD EXPLAINS – THE INSPIRATION FOR A MORE SINISTER ARCHETYPE.
    In the late 1950s, when I was a university student, there were still B movies. They were inexpensively made and lurid in nature, and you could see them at cheap matinee double bills as a means of escaping from your studies. Alien invasions, mind-altering potions and scientific experiments gone awry featured largely.
    Mad scientists were a staple of the B-film double bill. Presented with a clutch of white-coated men wielding test tubes, we viewers knew at once – being children of our times – that at least one of them would prove to be a cunning megalomaniac bent on taking over the world, all the while subjecting blondes to horrific experiments from which only the male lead could rescue them, though not before the mad scientist had revealed his true nature by gibbering and raving. Occasionally the scientists were lone heroes, fighting epidemics and defying superstitious mobs bent on opposing the truth by pulverising the scientist, but the more usual model was the lunatic. When thescientists weren’t crazy, they were deluded: their well-meaning inventions were doomed to run out of control, creating havoc, tumult and piles of messy goo, until gunned down or exploded just before the end of the film.
    Where did the mad scientist stock figure come from? How did the scientist – the imagined kind – become so very deluded and/or demented?
    It wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time there weren’t any scientists, as such, in plays or fictions, because there wasn’t any science as such, or not science as we know it today. There were alchemists and dabblers in black magic – sometimes one and the same – and they were depicted, not as lunatics, but as charlatans bent on fleecing the unwary by promising to turn lead into gold, or else as wicked pact-makers with the Devil, hoping – like Dr Faustus – to gain worldly wealth, knowledge and power in exchange for their souls. The too-clever-by-half part of their characters may have descended from Plato’s Atlanteans or the builders of Babel – ambitious exceeders of the boundaries set for human being, usually by some god, and destroyed for their presumption. These alchemists and Faustian magicians certainly form part of the mad scientist’s ancestral lineage, but they aren’t crazy or deluded, just daring and immoral.
    It’s a considerable leap from them to the excesses of the wild-eyed B-movie scientists. There must be a missing link somewhere, like the walking seal discovered just recently – though postulated by Charles Darwin as a link between a walking canid and a swimming seal. For