470 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



JOSIAH WILLAED GIBBS AND HIS EELATIOK TO 



MODEEN SCIENCE 



By fielding H. GARRISON, M.D. 



ASSISTANT LIBEARIAN, ARMY MEDICAL LIBRARY, WASHINGTON, D. C. 



THE scientific papers of the late Professor Willard Gibbs, of Yale 

 University, which have been brought together in a memorial 

 edition by his pupiP and colleague, Professor Bumstead, furnish one 

 of the most remarkable examples in existence of the value and fruit- 

 fulness of mathematical methods in scientific investigation. Origi- 

 nally printed in the scientific transactions of his native state, some of 

 these papers have, by reason of the speedy exhaustion of their first 

 imprints, been much sought after, but for many years practically in- 

 accessible, except in French and German translations. 



Gibbs was not, like Edison, Langley, Eowland, the inventor, experi- 

 menter or expert in delicate measurements, nor was he the great all- 

 round physicist, like Maxwell, Helmholtz or Lord Kelvin. He was 

 essentially and almost exclusively the mathematician, whose special 

 function was not the discovery of isolated facts or new methods of 

 experimental procedure, but the introduction of new currents of ideas; 

 and it was the severe and rigorous form in which his ideas were cast 

 that for a long period of time retarded their general adoption by the 

 scientific world. If we accept Cayley's view that theoretical dynamics 

 is in reality a branch of pure mathematics,^ then the opus magnum of 

 Gibbs, his survey of heterogeneous equilibrium, may be fairly accounted 

 a legitimate triumph for pure mathematics. 



The enormous growth of biological science in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury has somewhat overshadowed the importance of the deductive and 

 analytic methods which were the very life of the science of the past, 

 and although mathematics, beginning with primitive man's attempt to 

 count, lies at the basis of all his exact knowledge of the material world, 

 its true function has not always been appreciated or even understood. 

 The synthetic or Baconian method, of which we have such supreme 

 examples in the work of Galileo and Darwin, must always appeal by 

 its very simplicity to scientific men, since, instead of indulging in 

 special assumptions and hypotheses, it has obtained from nature, by 

 observation and experiment alone, facts which, as in the Darwinian 

 theory, can be concentrated upon some special proposition to be induced 

 with the surety of Moltke's tactical device, Getrennt marschieren, ver- 



^ J. Willard Gibbs, " Scientific Papers," 2 vols., New York and London, 1903. 

 '"Report British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1884, 20. 



