When I was at school in the 1940s, preparing for university entrance exams in science, we were advised to read Faraday's notebooks (by then in print) and other classic 19th C papers in physics, chemistry and biology, because it was supposed -- rightly in my opinion -- that we should thereby get an insight into the way the scientific mind works. And in the 18th C, as every student of HET well knows, undergraduates at Cambridge and the Scottish universities reading for an Honours degree were required to work through Newton's Principia in order to become better 'philosphers'. I am therefore inclined to demur from Kates's bold assertion that the study of one's great predecessors' can not make one a better scientist. Anthony Waterman