I fled him down the nights and down the days I fled him down the arches of the years.
It is thus that Francis Thompson, the English poet of the last decades of the 19th century, described a flight from The Hound of Heaven; and of the pursuit he records that it took place "with unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy."
The phrase "with all deliberate speed" has recently been used by a Justice of the Supreme Court in a definition of the tempo with which a decision of the Court involving far-reaching social readjustments should be put into effect. It is a phrase which the catalytic chemist may appropriate also to define his activities in the field of chemistry. Of themselves, chemical species have their own rates of interaction. It is the objective, the privilege, of the catalytic chemist deliberately to alter such speeds to good ends, either to hurry their achievement for easier, larger yields or to slow them down, to accelerate or retard. The science of deliberate speed extends across one hundred and fifty years from Faraday's experimental researches on electricity through Langmuir to the nuclear age which we now are entering.
In this age, the speeds range from the infinitesimal interval of the nuclear explosion to the deliberate speed of nuclear energy release in power plants for peaceful purposes.
Anyone acquainted with the railway journey, say on the California Zephyr, from Denver to Salt Lake City across the Colorado Rockies,