Building an Unseen Structure

We must first accommodate our mind s eye to the mental picture that corresponds to the second theory we described [i.e., structure theory]—for convenience, since it is less demanding for us, and also because the idea appeals somewhat better to a sensibility that is still (or perhaps that is once again) childlike. Hermann kopp  

The birth of the theory of structure was substantively connected to the contemporaneous emergence of a reformed system of atomic weights and molecular formulas, a system that the first structuralists had come to regard, on the basis of experiments such as those of Williamson, not as convention but as ontology—that is, as permanent and 

But Kekule s road from his London postdoctoral position to the start 

I refer to the Laurent-Gerhardt reform of 1846, as well as to that advocated from 1858 by Stanislao Cannizzaro, who made additional small but significant adjustments to the new system. See CA for details. 

Experiments, Models, Paper Tools (2003), 5,12, and passim. 

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