BY MAURICE B. VISSCHER

IT IS DIFFICULT to compress into a memoir of reasonable length the story of a scientist who was born on an Idaho ranch, educated in an ungraded elementary school and small town high school, attended a newly established state university, and yet went on to become a first-rank, pioneering scientist in a new and uncharted field. Yet even from this short account it will be apparent that his life was of importance to the advancement, philosophy, and ethics of science.

The period of Dwight Ingle's active life was the time of rapid development in endocrine science, to which Ingle himself contributed greatly. His career included a series of statistically improbable successful ventures, chronicled in his autobiography, I Went to See the Elephant.¹ The title comes from John Godfrey Saxe's story of ''the six blind men of Indostan,'' who describe an elephant according to the part of the animal they can touch with their hands, and Ingle displayed genuine modesty in choosing it, for, as he explains in the book's preface, "Science does involve looking at some specific properties of systems that are too big to get into perspective." With a simple and genuine modesty, he continues: