THE PROGRESS OF SCIEM //. 



9 1 



a decided stand in regard to I lie ipio- 

 tion of solar heat. He rejects llie 

 theories of Helmholtz and Kelvin, as 

 being incompatible with geological evi- 

 dence. While chemical theories have 

 been considered hopelessly insullicicnt 

 to account for the tremendous out- 

 pour of heat observed, Arrhenius advo- 

 cates a return to them. He points out 

 that the exchanges of energy in t lie re- 

 distribution of chemical equilibria are 

 enormously greater at very high tem- 

 peratures than at lower ones and that 

 for this reason computations made 

 from laboratory data have no bearing 

 on the problem. While this hypoth- 

 esis of Arrhenius may not stand the 

 test of time, it is an interesting one 

 and especially in view of the peculiar 

 heat effects manifested by radium. Of 

 the book itself Professor Barus says, 

 in a review : "Asa whole the work will 

 take rank beside the great contribu- 

 tions of Mohn, Guldberg (who, it will 

 be noted, shared with Arrhenius this 

 double allegiance to chemistry and geo- 

 physics), and others, who have made 

 meteorology a debtor to the thinkers 

 of the North." It may also be men- 

 tioned that Arrhenius will attend the 

 International Congress of Arts and Sci- 

 ence at St. Louis as one of the speak- 

 ers before the Section of the Sciences 

 of the Earth. 



The most recent papers of Arrhenius 

 deal with the chemistry of serums, and 

 it seems probable that the study of 

 medical problems will occupy much of 

 his time during the next few years. 

 In Arrhenius w r e have a man who has 

 received the Nobel prize before he was 

 forty-five, and whose scientific work 

 ranges from, salt solutions to comets 

 and from glacial periods to the typhoid 

 bacillus. Such a record lends little 

 support to the belief that a scientific 

 man must be a narrow specialist if he 

 is to attain eminence. This belief 

 rests on a misapprehension. It is true 

 that scientific men are accumulating 

 facts at a tremendous rate and that 

 this apparently makes it more and 

 more difficult for anv one man to be 



master of anything more than a small 

 branch of a single science. Along with 

 this accumulation of isolated facts, 

 however, there comes the development 

 of great simplifying generalizations 

 or laws which enable men to grasp and 

 remember an enormous number of 

 facts. It is only during the brief 

 periods when the discovery of new 

 facts has not yet given rise to newer 

 and more comprehensive theories that 

 there is even an appearance of narrow- 

 ness. 



LINNJWS. 



Carolus Linnaeus was born on May 

 13, 1707, and suggestions have already 

 been made as to the celebration of the 

 bicentenary of his birth. The centen- 

 ary of his death was duly commemor- 

 ated by the erection of a statue in 

 Stockholm by Professor Kjelberg which 

 stands in the Humlegarden, and repre- 

 sents the great naturalist holding in 

 his hand the ' Systema Naturae ' and 

 surrounded by allegorical figures repre- 

 senting botany, zoology, mineralogy 

 and medicine. Just what form the 

 celebration of the bicentenary of Lin- 

 naeus's birth will take in his native 

 country has not been decided, but it 

 is not perhaps too early to make prepa- 

 rations for a suitable commemoration 

 in America. 



There has perhaps been in recent 

 years a tendency to depreciate the work 

 of Linnaeus, some of his ideas having 

 been discovered in the publications of 

 previous writers and his works nat- 

 urally containing many mistakes. But 

 he is the founder of botany and in a 

 way of modern natural history to an 

 extent but rarely vouchsafed in sci- 

 ence to a single man. He left order 

 where there had been confusion, and 

 largely prescribed the development of a 

 science for a century, until the time of 

 Darwin and the theory of evolution. 

 Linnaeus himself seems almost to have 

 foreseen the course of events, for he 

 said : ' A natural method is the first 

 and last thing to be desired in bot- 

 any; nature does not make leaps.' 



