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Nantucket has always been a pretty good place to find sea shells; up to 1945 professional scientists had counted 46 different species of Mollusca on the island and in its waters. That was about the time Dwight Taylor of Pasadena, now a bright-eyed, serious 17-year-old, began his collection. Dwight kept picking up sea shells until he had picked up 120 species of them, and enough mollusk lore to write a dozen-page scientific treatise: "A Malacological Survey of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts."

Last week, largely because of his treatise, Dwight Taylor was in Washington, D.C.--one of 40 fledgling scientists chosen from high schools all over the U.S. in the Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s seven-year-old annual "Science Talent Search." To begin with, there had been 16,218 bright young juniors like Dwight, but successive screenings and aptitude tests soon cut the number down to 2,842, then to the 40 who got the trip to the capital.

No Comment. All of them had five days of sightseeing and lectures. Dwight called on his Congressman, Republican Carl Hinshaw ("A commanding personality," Dwight thought), then on to Harry Truman, on whom he had no comment for the press. On the last night, he and his 39 colleagues crowded into the Presidential Room of the Hotel Statler with 300 other guests to hear who would win Westinghouse's $2,800 and $2,000 college scholarships. There were consolation awards for everybody else: eight $400 scholarships and 30 prizes of $100 each.

It seemed to the 40 that it took Harvard's orotund Astronomer Harlow Shapley hours to get to the point. First he had to make a little speech, then announce the names of the eight runners-up, make them each take a bow. Finally the two winning names shot out. First prize: Dwight Taylor. Second: studious, pretty 16-year-old Caroline Stuart Littlejohn of Oklahoma City.

To Dwight, the announcement came as no great surprise. The son of a Pasadena physicist, he has also been studying the distribution, taxonomic position and ecology of mollusks in Southern California. Where would all this lead him (after four years at the University of Michigan)? "Oh, I'll probably end up in some university museum or something. One can't live on just nothing."

Two Words. Runner-up Caroline Littlejohn, who hopes to use her scholarship at Barnard, had not been so confident. She is at the top of her class in Classen High in Oklahoma City, but she was worried about missing two weeks of school for the trip and not sure what the judges would think of her essay, "Beginning Researches in the Mathematical Theory of Relativity and Its Applications." When she heard her name called and stepped to the mike she found just two words for her fellow scientists: "Oh heavens! . . ."

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