Simile
A simile is a figure of speech where one thing is said to be 'like' / 'as' another – as an explicit way of suggesting a comparison.
A simile is different from a metaphor, as in metaphor the comparison is implicit (one thing is said to be another, although this is not meant to be taken literally). [See the note at the foot of the page.]
Read about 'Science metaphors'
I also consider comparisons as similes rather than metaphors where they are marked by the use of inverted commas as 'scare quotes', or qualified by phrases such as "if you like", "so to speak" or "kind of".
| metaphor | simile | taken as simile |
| the nucleus is the brain of the cell | the nucleus is like the brain of the cell; the nucleus acts as the brain to a cell | the nucleus is the 'brain' of the cell; the nucleus is, so to speak, the brain of the cell; the nucleus is kind of the brain of the cell, etc. |
Similes may be used as thinking and communication techniques. In teaching, comparisons such as similes may be used as one way to 'make the unfamiliar familiar'.
Read more about 'Making the unfamiliar familiar'
An simile that has commonly been used in teaching about atomic structure is that 'the atom is like a tiny solar system'. (This simile is developed into an analogy if the comparison is explained by drawing parallels between the two systems.)
Read about a research paper on 'Upper Secondary Students' Understanding of the Basic Physical Interactions in Analogous Atomic and Solar Systems'
Comparisons such as metaphors and similes can be found in teaching and textbooks, but also in learners' own thinking, in scientists' own work, and in popular accounts of science.
Some examples from science reported in the media
A ell is organised into rooms like a spacecraft
Antibodies are like harpoons or missiles which the cell sends out to kill a pathogen
Immune response to viral infection can be like a fire being ignited (a scientist being interviewed on the radio)
Some examples from scientists’/scholar’s writings
| Topic | Simile | Source |
| biology | "If we ever succeed in obtaining a complete picture of the organism in that aspect, we can then construct a theory of all its functions. Logically too the concept of structure serves as a surer starting point, because it at once prescribes a definite direction for research and furnished biology with an Archimedean fulcrum, as it were." | Ernst Cassirer (discussing the ideas of Johannes von Uexküll) |
| earth's crust | "To date we have declared the nature & powers of the loadstone, & also the properties & essence of iron; it now remains to show their mutual affinities, & kinship, so to speak, & how very closely conjoined these substances are. At the highest part of the terrestrial globe, or at its perishable surface & rind, as it were, these two bodies usually originate & are produced in one and the same matrix, as twins in one mine." | William Gilbert |
| energy | The law of conservation of energy was "like a sacred commandment". | Max Planck |
| excretion through the skin | "For the limbs reject, when it arrives, the infected blood that is allocated for their nourishment, and this is expelled from the whole body by natural means through the skin acting like a handkerchief…" | Jacobus Cataneus de Lacumarcino (C.16th), quoted by Ludwik Fleck |
| fossils | "These wrecks of a former state of nature, thus wonderfully preserved (like ancient medals and inscriptions in the ruins of an empire), afford a sort of rude chronology, by whose aid the successive depositions of the strata in which they are found may be marked out in epochs more or less definitely terminated, and each characterized by some peculiarity which enables us to recognise the deposits of any period, in whatever part of the world they may be found." | Sir John Frederick William Herschel, {1792 – 1871, polymath scientist} |
| geology | "At its most abstract, Lyell is proposing a change from seeing geology as a litany of an enormous number of singular events (like a huge epic poem) to seeing it as the systemization [sic] of a small number of kinds of events. Thus, instead of seeing a particular mountain as a sign of a massive upthrust at some given date in the past, he sees it as a typical example of a kind of change that is occurring today. There are no privileged moments. His geology is a kind of bookkeeping device that allows the storage of vast amounts of information by sorting them into a kind of filing cabinet of different kinds of events." | Geoffrey C. Bowker (Professor of Informatics) |
| history of chemistry | "Thus, it was entirely of the omission of exact numerical determinations of quantity that the mistakes and confusion of the Stahlian chemistry were attributable,–a confusion which dissipated like a morning mist as soon as precision, in this respect, came to be regarded as essential.""" | John Herschel |
| interferons | "The results of both types of studies were unimpressive, undoubtedly because of the small quantities of impure interferon available; consequently, for years studies on interferons were limited to experiments in tissue culture and attempts to produce and purify sufficient quantities of type I interferon from human white blood cells to carry out significant clinical studies, so that in the early 1970s, interferons languished in a scientific Siberia of sorts. | Professor Robert M. Friedman (British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology) |
| magnetism (misconceptions) | "if a loadstone [lodestone] be anointed with garlic, or if a diamond be near, it does not attract iron…the errors have been sedulously propagated, and have gained ground (like ill weeds that grow apace) coming down even to our own day…" | William Gilbert |
| magnetism | "A loadstone loses some attractive power, and, as it were, pines away with age, if exposed too long to the open air instead of being laid in a case with filings or scales of iron." | William Gilbert |
| natural selection | "Like a Tibetan prayer-wheel, Selection Theory murmurs untiringly: 'Everything is useful.' But as to what actually happened and which lines evolution has actually followed, selection theory says nothing, for the evolution is the product of 'chance', and therein obeys no 'law'." | Ludwig von Bertalanffy |
| nuclear chain reaction | "…it may happen as a consequence of the increasing bombardment of uranium atoms by the liberated neutrons the energy thus released will swell like an avalanche within a very short time." | Max Planck (Nobel prize winning physicist) |
| physics | "Physics constitutes a logical system of thought which is in a state of evolution, whose basis cannot be distilled, as it were, from experience by an inductive method, but can only be arrived at by free invention." | Albert Einstein {1879 – 1955, theoretical physicist and peace campaigner} |
| scientific explanation | "…to demand the suppression of scientific explanation, or even its restriction to subsumptive explanation, is very much like killing the golden egg hen of science." | Mario Bunge {physicist and philosopher of science} |
| scientific style | "…a small but growing group of scientists …might be called splitters rather than lumpers. They have an important role in the advancement of science, for that often depends on the interaction and alternation of these two traits of research – as if science moved on two feet." | Gerald Holton (physicist and historian of science) |
| spiders as predators | "Spiders' webs are mostly found in places one could call fly interchanges." | Jakob von Uexküll |
| theory of natural selection | "Darwin…collected one stone after another, as it were, carefully examining each for flaws and fitting it to others until at last the whole edifice stood complete." | Ernst Cassirer |
| trace elements | "… rare elements and heavy atoms, as trace elements play an important role for life; with their very special qualities they are, in a manner of speaking, the 'spice' in the soup of life." | Richard Breuer |
Simile in popular accounts of science
| Topic | Simile | Source |
| antibodies | "On the other end [of the antibody] is the tailpiece, which acts like a cattle prod to kick other immune cells and molecules into action to destroy the target." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "a pentamer, which means five IgM molecules are bound together to form a sort of massive antibody throwing-star with 10 binding sites." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "The almost instant assault of the immediate phase reaction occurs within minutes as the dirty bomb-like explosion of the mast cell fill the local area with a variety of rapidly acting chemicals." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antibodies | "You don't need to know where all the cells are because your mAbs [monoclonal antibodies] will do the legwork for you, incessantly scouring the body for their target destination like tiny, demented postal workers without a good union." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| asteroids & comets | "One suggested method to release water from small asteroids or comets involves literally bagging up the captured object and harnessing highly concentrated sunlight to 'sweat' the water out, by using the Sun's energy to break it up and/or 'dig' holes in it to release water and other volatiles. This 'sweating' technique is known as 'optical mining',…" | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| atomic structure | "As the nuclei became heavier, the [relativistic] effects became more pronounced. By the time the model reached oganesson, the supposed electron shells are more like electron soup." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| Bose-Einstein condensates | "Normally the [Bose-Einstein] condensate would be totally opaque, but the first laser creates a sort of ladder through the condensate that the second light beam can claw its way along – at vastly reduced speeds." | Brian Clegg Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| brain | "[Helen] Mayberg's sense of Area 25 is that it's like a 'junction box' for the parts of the brain that work together to mitigate the effects of negative mood and depression." | Lauren Slater The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| brain scans | "Across the four years of scans [the medical masterminds of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge] noticed bizarre ring-like patterns, looking much like Captain Scarlet's Mysterons…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell death | "TNF (tumour necrosis factor) superfamily-mediated cell death involves a receptor (from the THN superfamily) on the surface of the infected cell, which is like a magic key capable of unlocking death when turned by the right hand." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| comets | "While the dirty snowball analogy is useful, as we discussed, another good way to think about comets is as the fluff of the Solar System: this helps to describe their fragile texture, something that is directly inherited from the environment in which they formed." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| complement system | "…a constant low-level spontaneous activation of C3 in the blood, breaking it up into C3a and C3b like a showing of tiny hand grenades on the surrounding cells." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| elementary particles | "By the 1950s, elementary (or seemingly elementary) particles were proliferating, and new 'quantum numbers' were invented to describe them: charge, spin, parity (related to mirror image symmetry), isospin, strangeness, charm … they came out of efforts to classify particles by their properties, to organise them into kinship groups, so to speak, depending on how interacted with each other." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| evolution | "The creative power of evolution is more like a copycat who duplicates and modifies ancient DNA, proteins, and even the blueprints that build organs, for billions of years." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "…since the genetic control regions are specific to tissues, like a thermostat in a room, a change in one organ won't effect any others." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genetic mutation | "A mutation would be revealed by a local change in the pattern of stripes. We know that the bands are like a GPS with poor satellite coverage; they give a location of the genetic defect of a mutant, but not a precise one." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genetics | "The technique was crude: they mushed fly bodies into a paste, isolated their DNA, put the mixture in a gel, and added their gene with a dye. The idea was that the gene would act like molecular flypaper and attach to every gene with a similar sequence." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genetics | "All these genes were set like beads on a string next to one another on the chromosome." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genome | "The genome at every level resembles a musical score in which the same musical phrases are repeated in different ways to make vastly different songs." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genome | "The genome is the stuff of B movies, like a graveyard filled with ghosts. Bits and pieces of ancient viral fragments lie everywhere-by some estimates, 8 percent of our genome is composed of dead viruses, more that a hundred thousand of them at last count. Some of these fossil viruses have kept a function, to make proteins useful in pregnancy, memory, and countless other activities discovered in the past five years. Others sit like corpses where they attached to the genome only to be extinguished and decay." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| homeobox (Hox) genes | "Sonic is like a general tool that development pulls from its tool kit to make diverse organs and tissues." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| immune system | "…the cells that line the blood vessels, which stick out receptors like tiny hands that loosely grab the moving neutrophils…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| interplanetary dust particles | "Particles of cosmic dust on Earth are micrometeorites (small meteorites), the very smallest of which are otherwise known as interplanetary dust particles (IDP). These small dust grains are like the seeds of the Solar System and they originate from a wide range of Solar System objects, including comets and asteroids…" | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| isotopic composition | "In essence, scientists would like to see if the water on comets and asteroids has the same 'flavour' as the water on Earth." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| isotopic composition | "Meteorites that are suspected to have been knocked off Mars bring with them Martian atmospheric gases they trapped within their rock structure when they formed. When these samples are cracked open in laboratories on Earth, the gases trapped inside can be measured and their composition and abundance compared with the measurements made in space – like a sort of 'fingerprinting'." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Kupffer cells | "The Kupffer cells hang around like spiders on the walls of the blood vessels waiting to catch any red blood cells which have passed their best before date (typically 120 days)." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| implantation | "It [the blastocyst – "the ball of cells that makes up the new embryo"] tears a hole deep into the lining of the uterus, forcing its way down through layers of tissue, like a feral animal that leaves a trail of inflammation in its wake." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infectious disease | "A sudden outbreak of disease – West Nile virus say, or cholera or salmonella – appears to us like a breach in a force field, an aberration that we expect some authority will address and stamp out before it comes close to threatening our families." | Thomas Goetz The Remedy. Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the quest to cure tuberculosis. |
| light | "…Newton's theory [of light] was like a punch-drunk boxer: still standing, not realising that he has already been knocked out." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| light | "…Hau's first experiments used one laser to form a sort of ladder through the otherwise opaque Bose-Einstein condensate that allowed a second ladder to claw its way through. But if that first laser, called the coupling laser, is gradually decreased in power, the team found the second beam was swallowed up in the material." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| macrophages | "…a set of varied and diverse circumstances can prompt multiple macrophages to congregate together and, like a massive Transformer, self-assemble into one magnificent giant cell boasting multiple nuclei." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| memory | "Memory is tricky and notoriously unreliable, but it has its physical place too. Memories hide in the hippocampus and then get uploaded for long-term storage as if to a friable file cabinet corroded by rust and holes." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| NK [natural killer] cells | "…NK cells are distributed far and wide throughout the body because they act as sentinels, interrogating the cells they meet to see if they've been compromised." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| nuclear stability | "The island of stability and the elements surrounding it seemed like ghosts, and repeated attempts to make them had, like the hint in nature, failed." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| nucleic acids | Nucleic acids "act as genetic moulds" | Andrew Scott, Vital Principles. The molecular mechanisms of life |
| proteins | "Proteins can act as gatekeepers of the cell…" "Proteins can…act as chemical controllers" "The proteins which perform these feats are not gates, but 'pumps'…" "…proteins are the molecular 'labourers' of life…" "act as freight vehicles transporting various chemicals around the body" "as chemical messages which are sent from one cell to another" "can act as defensive weapons…" | Andrew Scott, Vital Principles. The molecular mechanisms of life |
| proton pumps | "Parietal cells dotted around the surface of the stomach are equipped with proton pumps, which are like tiny merry-go-rounds for ions." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| quantum entanglement | "But every once in a while, instead of one photon, two were given off, each of lower energy. These two photons were 'born' entangled, the optical equivalent of twins." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| red giants | "The star's interior convection cells, …may be sloshing around like an imbalanced washing machine tub, …the surface is still bouncing like a plate of gelatin dessert [jelly]…" | NASA website [discussed here] |
| ribosomes | "A ribosome travels down its attached mRNA, a bit like a bead running down a thread (or sometimes like a thread being pulled through a bead)…" "…the 'ribosomes' – molecular 'work-benches' composed of protein and RNA…" | Andrew Scott Vital Principles. The molecular mechanisms of life |
| skin cells | "…it takes the skin cells two to four weeks to migrate through the four layers of the epidermis, changing their appearance like tiny chameleons…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| space exploration | "The result is that Rosetta's journey resembled something like a cosmic pinball game as it performed multiple close fly-bys of planets – the Earth in 2005, 2007 and 2009, and Mars in 2007 – four orbits around the Sun and two transits through the asteroid belt." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| space exploration | "When the results came in, at first the mission scientists thought that the Rosetta instruments had failed to analyse the asteroid [Luteria] at all, being too distant to 'sniff' its gases. Instead, they thought they had simply sniffed the spacecraft itself, or rather its exhaust gases. … after careful examination of the data the scientists saw that Rosetta had picked up the scent of the asteroid after all." | Natalie StarkeyCatching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| vaccination | "The news of Pasteur's anthrax vaccine itself spread like a virus through Europe." [This can also be seen as a pun.] | Thomas Goetz The Remedy. Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the quest to cure tuberculosis. |
| viruses | "The unvaccinated population were [sic] like fish in a barrel for the measles virus." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
Simile in the media
| Topic | Simile | Source |
| colliding galaxies | "…we know that galaxies merge over their history, and we know that most galaxies harbour a very large black hole in their hearts, and when two galaxies merge, each of them carrying a black hole, the two black holes kind of sink slowly towards the centre of the newly formed larger galaxies…" | Dr Davide Castelvecchi, Senior Reporter, Physical Sciences, Nature talking on the Nature podcast |
| crystal structures | "…the picture I think people should have in mind when you talk about these crystalline arrangements, It's a crystal lattice, like a grid-work, you know, where the atoms are arranged in these equally spaced points" So it's a pattern, in effect, it's like wall paper, | Professor Sir Harry Bhadeshia (Emeritus Tata Steel Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge; Professor of Metallurgy, Queen Mary University of London) interviewed on an episode of BBC's The Life Scientific |
| endocrine system | "So to avoid easily tripping over into too much or too little [of a hormone], you need to have a very fine system to control everything and keep it stable. And so I think what we have developed is essentially proteins that will carry and protect those hormones… you've got proteins that will reduce it if it is a little too much, that will change the level depending upon your age or your puberty or pregnancy, so you need a fine tune system to keep everything, basically it's like a Ferrari, you have to keep everything in sync." | Sadaf Farooqi – Professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge, speaking on an edition of BBC's In Our Time |
| homeobox genes | "And what we had to do was to separate those two strands, and then ask those separated strands to find the complementary sequence in the human genome that we had also separated into single stranded pieces. So, it was sort of like a magnet, sort of like asking that fly piece [of D.N.A.] to bind to the opposite strand in the human genome like a magnet." | Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, interviewed on 'The Life Scientific' |
| innate immune system | "And the innate immune system is a bit like a, it's a bit like an antiviral software that we are all born with that fights infection." | Dr James Kinross, Senior Lecturer in Colorectal Surgery and a Consultant Surgeon at Imperial College London, speaking on 'Start the Week' |
| mitochondria | "You can think of mitochondria as tiny batteries, that live inside our cells and provide them with energy." | Dr Michael Mosley on BBC's 'Stay Young' |
| natural selection | "…the mutations are sort of the raw material on which natural selection can operate on" | Prof. Jay T. Lennon (Indiana University Bloomington) interviewed on the Nature podcast |
| nuclear fusion technology | "[the US National Ignition Facility] have done this with a laser as the kind of spark plug to put the energy into the reaction" | Dr Nick Hawker, First Light Fusion, interviewed on Radio 4 news programme PM |
| optical fibres | "A fibre laser works by first converting electricity to laser light, using lots of laser diodes, which are high-powered versions of what you might find in a CD player. That light is then channelled into a long, thin, spaghetti-like optical fibre…" | Andy Extance (science journalist/writer) interviewed on the Nature Podcast |
| physiology | "…muscles cells, in the other hand, have a positive effect, when you exercise they soak up blood sugars like a sponge" | Dr Michael Mosley on BBC Just One Thing – Stay Young |
| pollution | "We insert emission control technology into stacks in power plants, and those technologies, sort of, chew up pollution before it reaches the atmosphere…" | Dr Eloise Marais, Associate Professor in Physical Geography, University College London, talking on BBC Inside Science |
| spinal cord injury | "My interpretation of this would be that before the rehabilitation, all these damaged nerves are sort of screaming to try and get the message through to the legs, but it is not working. But, the, some of the nerves learn that they can actually do this, and the other ones become less loud. In other words you are sort of retraining those nerves almost." | Roland Pease summarising research on BBC's Science in Action |
| stars | "heavy stars…which have this sort of onion skin structure" | Prof. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, talking on the radio [discussed here] |
| T cells | "The Y-negative cells cause an immune evasive environment in the tumour, and that, if you will, paralyses, the T cells, and exhausts them, makes them tired and ineffective, and this prevents the Y-negative tumour from being rejected, therefore allowing it to grow much better." | Prof. Dan Theodorescu speaking on the Nature Podcast (read about this) |
| transmissible cancers | "…the cancer cells, they don't produce many of the molecules on their surface that kind of act as a flag to the immune system, so they can kind of slip in unannounced if you see what I mean…" | Dr Benjamin Thompson, Senior Multimedia Editor, Nature, talking on the Nature podcast |
| X-ray stars | "if you see X-rays coming from a star, it's like a flag that the star is waving at you saying, 'look at me, look at me, I'm interesting'." | Prof. Paul Murdin Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, interviewed on BBC The Life Scientific |
Science as a source for simile…
| Source topic | Simile | Source of simile |
| black holes | "Now there's a look in your eyes Like black holes in the sky" | Pink Floyd From the lyrics to 'Shine on you crazy diamond' (David Gilmour / Richard Wright / Roger Waters) |
| brain | "…I have run a kind of split-brain laboratory, spending summers in the field looking for fossils and working the rest of the year with embryos and DNA." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| Rorschach [ink-blots] test | The test "does not reveal a behaviour picture, but rather shows – like an X-ray picture – the underlying structure which makes behaviour understandable". | Bruno Klopfer, psychoanalyst, reported in Damion Searls, The Inkblots. Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test & the power of seeing |
Learner’s simile
| Source topic | Simile | Source of simile |
| Cell nucleus | "It's kind of like, the brain of the cell kind of. It's, it's what gets the cell to do everything, it's like, the core of the cell." | 'Bert': Y10 student (Read about this example) |
Note on analogies, similes and metaphors.
In practice the precise demarcations between similes, metaphors (and anthropomorphisms) and analogies may not be absolutely clear. I have tried to follow the rule that if a comparison is set out to make a structural mapping clear (even if this is not spelt out as a mapping: e.g., an atom with its electrons is like a sun with its planets) this counts as an analogy. Where I do not think a comparison is an analogy, but the comparison is made explicit ("…as if…", "…like…": e.g., the atom, like a tiny solar system) I consider this a simile. When the audience is left to spot a comparison (rather than a literal identity) is being made (e.g., the oxygen atom, this tiny solar system) I class this a metaphor.
Anthropomorphism may be seen as a particular kind of metaphor where a metaphorical feature implies a non-human entity has human attributes (e.g., meteors can be impetuous).
I reserve the right to reassign some of these comparisons in due course!
