482 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



sophical Society in 1876 declared that the methods of Gibbs " seemed 

 to throw a new light upon thermodynamics." Copies of the work were 

 consequently much prized and sought after in England about this time ; 

 but the most substantial recognition of Gibbs's work was to come from 

 Holland, where a long line of physical chemists, van der Waals, Eooze- 

 boom, van't Hoff, Lorentz, Schreinemakers, Stortenbeker, van Laar, 

 Hoitsema, Kamerlingh Onnes, have developed his ideas with very sub- 

 stantial additions to their own fame. Parallel with the work of these 

 men and the development of the important laws of Goldberg and 

 Waage, van't HoflE and Arrhenius, the science of physical chemistry, 

 which DuBois Eeymond called " the chemistry of the future," came into 

 being under the leadership of Ostwald in Germany and (since 1896) of 

 Professor Bancroft in America. With the gradual recognition of the 

 significance of " reversible reactions "*® and of Sainte-Claire-Deville's 

 doctrine of chemical dissociation, the algebraic formulge of Gibbs 

 became slowly converted into working theories of physical chemistry. 

 In 1892 Ostwald translated Gibbs's papers as " Thermodynamische 

 Studien " and part of them were rendered into French in 1899 by Le 

 Chatellier. The purely mathematical part of Gibbs's theory has been 

 developed in extension by the labors of Duhem, Paul Sorel, Trevor, 

 Bancroft, van der Waals, Larmor and Bryan. Eoozeboom, van der 

 Waals and Bancroft have made the widest applications of his ideas to 

 chemistr}^, while their best interpretation from the dynamic or ener- 

 getic point of view is that of Ostwald^° and of Larmor,^^ Although 

 a genial and engaging writer in his discourse on " Multiple Algebra " 

 and his biographical sketches, the strictly scientific papers of Gibbs are 

 not, like those of Maxwell, Boltzmann and Hertz, attractive reading. 

 Indeed, it has been said of his memoir on equilibrium that Ostwald is 

 one of the few people in the world who ever read every word of it, for 

 the student is repelled, not so much by its bristling quickset of some 

 seven hundred formula as by the severe and austere reasoning and a 

 literary style that is swift in movement and (doubtless from the very 

 nature of the subject matter) tense and dry in quality. Although 

 endowed with the scientific imagination of a man of genius, Gibbs's 

 strong point in demonstration was unusual quickness of intelligence 



" The difference between reversible and irreversible chemical processes could 

 hardly be better indicated than in the following comparison of van't Hoff: 

 " Kill a chicken and prepare chicken soup ; it would then be very difficult to get 

 your chicken again. This is because preparing chicken soup is not reversible. 

 On the contrary, let water evaporate or freeze, it will be easy to reproduce the 

 water" {J. Phys. Chem., 1905, IX., 87). The distinction between reversible and 

 irreversible reactions is thus a physico-chemical or thermodynamic conception, 

 depending, like the operations of mechanical systems, upon the initial condi- 

 tions, under which the phenomenon takes place. 



"'See Ostwald, " Lehrb. d. allg. Chemie," Leipzig, 1896, II., 2. Th., 114-5. 



" See " Encycl. Britan.," 10th ed., XXVIII., sub voce Energetics. 



