June, 1925
INDUSTRIAL AND ElVGIiVEERIiYG CHEMISTRY
has always had broad interests as well as the imagination which has enabled him to predict scientific discoveries. His love of music, art, literature, and history, are famous here, as is also his marvelous conversational ability. He is constantly in demand at social functions and, with a good cigar, is the most delightful of companions. Although always an admirer of the gentler sex, h e remains a confirmed bachelor, and now occupies “The Monastery” alone, his colleagues having deserted him one by one for t h e married life, He has definite notions, however, as t o how children should be brought up. His feeling is that the present generation is not well disciplined, that, as he pithily puts it, the average boy should be “lathered with a cowhide.” Dr. McCay’s love for Wagner and knowledge of his art-work is very great. Everything written about them he reads with deep interest. After finishing the Wesendonck Letters he perpetrated the following: Richard Wagner became once so bold he Said Minna was passee and moldy; So with dynamic brazen honk He exalted the Wesendonck I n his opera Tristan und Isolde.
Such respect has Dr. McCay for everything Wagnerian that t h e platinum dishes used by him in his hydrofluoric acid work have been dubbed Isolde, Briinnehilde, and Elsa. Dean West having suggested to him that the term “brain storm” be called “psychotyphosis,” McCay wrote:
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If spiritual truth is called gnosis, And disease of the bones the necrosis, As has rightly been said A mad swirl in the head Were best called the psychotyphosis.
These are examples of some hundred or more of his limericks. Many imitations of Swinburne and Rossetti, as well as original poems, have flowed from his facile pen. Like Swinburne, he is “a master of the phrase.” Always a great reader of history and the Scriptures, he has shown in a remarkable essay that Jezebel, Queen of Israel, was related to Queen Dido, immortalized by the poet Virgil. According to his reasoning Dido was a grandniece of Jezebel. Dr. McCay displayed his playful humor in an article written to the editor of The Analyst in 1887, entitled “Oleomargarine and iMice.” He relates that he left two specimens of pure butter and two of oleo in his laboratory overnight; the mice dined on the butters, but completely ignored the oleos. “How would it do to make this extraordinary acuteness on the part of mice the basis of a rough method for testing butter?” In the following number of The Analyst, Professor Harris, of England, not only admires the ingenuity of the “mouse test,” but suggests how it might be made puantitatizie. A mind of alert, versatile, and searching power, deeply grounded in the best scientific knowledge, a living interest in the word of fact and fancy outside the “domain of chemistry,” a keen social instinct, and a rare gift of comradeship-these are the WILLIAMFOSTER traits of Professor McCay.
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