THE PROGRESS OF SCIEM '/•/. 



89 



THE SCIENTIFIC WORK OF PRO- 

 FESSOR ARRHENIl 8. 



There are many people who believe 

 that the scientific man of to-day must 

 be a narrow specialist if he is to make 

 a name for himself. It may, there- 

 fore, be well to consider how far this 

 is true of Arrhenius, to whom a Nobel 

 prize has recently been awarded. 

 Svante August Arrhenius was born in 

 Sweden, February 19, 1859. In 1S83 

 he received the doctor's degree from 

 the University of Upsala, though not 

 in a very satisfactory way. Arrhenius 

 had taken for his thesis the galvanic 

 conductivity of electrolytes, and had 

 developed the outlines of what is now 

 known as the electrolytic dissociation 

 theory. The importance of the work 

 submitted by the young Arrhenius was 

 not perceived as clearly in Upsala then 

 as it is now. The physicists main- 

 tained that the thesis was essentially 

 chemical in nature and that it did not 

 represent work in the field of physics. 

 The chemists were equally positive 

 that the thesis dealt more with phys- 

 ics than with chemistry. When this 

 latter contention was over-ruled offici- 

 ally, Arrhenius was given his degree 

 ' non sine laude.' 



It is probable that the thesis would 

 have been approved with even less en- 

 thusiasm if it had not been for Pro- 

 fessor Pettersson, who took a strong 

 stand in favor of Arrhenius, and yet 

 it is not much of an exaggeration to 

 say that the Nobel prize was awarded 

 to Arrhenius for the ideas contained 

 in his doctor thesis. When the theory 

 of electrolytic dissociation was sup- 

 plemented by the van't Hoff theory of 

 osmotic pressure, the aggressive energy 

 and wonderful teaching ability of Ost- 

 wald developed physical chemistry 

 from an unimportant and almost un- 

 recognized subject to its present posi- 

 tion. 



In 1886 Arrhenius received a grant 

 from the Swedish Academy which en- 

 abled him to work in Germany with 

 Kohlrausch, in Austria with Boltz- 

 manh, in- Russia with Ostwald, and in 



Holland with van't. Iloff. His friends, 

 however, were not able to get him any 

 official place until 1891, when Ar- 

 rhenius was given a teaching position 

 in physics at the Stockholm Hogskola. 

 The opposition to Arrhenius was so 

 strong that it was with difficulty that 

 he was promoted to the chair of phys- 

 ics at Stockholm in 1895, and he was 

 only elected a member of the Swedish 

 Academy in 1901. 



During the first eight years after 

 graduation, the work of Arrhenius was 

 chiefly chemical. The electrolytic dis- 

 sociation theory w r as not received en- 

 thusiastically by the majority of the 

 physicists, and the chemists, with a few 

 striking exceptions, were even more 

 hostile to it. The bulk of the mis- 

 sionary work was done by Ostwald, but 

 Arrhenius was not backward in the 

 fray. While never deserting the old 

 love, new interests arose when Ar- 

 rhenius was appointed to teach phys- 

 ics at Stockholm. We have first a 

 series of investigations on conductivity 

 in flames and hot gases, which is a very 

 natural development of the earlier work 

 on the conductivity of solutions. This 

 work on gases led by easy transitions 

 to a study of cosmical physics. In 

 1894 Arrhenius considers the effect of 

 the moon on the electrical state of the 

 earth's atmosphere. In 1895 a calcu- 

 lation of Langley's measurements on 

 the radiation from the moon leads to a 

 theory of the glacial period and the 

 Eocene period as brought about by the 

 variation in the amount of carbonic 

 acid in the air. In 1900 we have a 

 cosmical speculation in which there is 

 a systematic discussion of the nature 

 of comets, nebula;, protuberances, fac- 

 ulae and zodiacal light, as well as of 

 the variations of barometric pressure, 

 terrestrial magnetism, etc. 



In 1903 appeared the ' Lehrbuch der 

 cosmischen Physik,' two large volumes 

 of approximately five hundred pages 

 each. The first volume deals with 

 astronomical and geological phenomena, 

 while the second is practically a trea- 

 tise on meteorology. Arrhenius takes 



