SVANTE ARRHENIUS — WALKER 733 



to attend conferences in all countries for the purpose of meeting 

 his scientific colleagues and discussing with them their special prob- 

 lems. He often visited England and was elected a foreign member 

 of the Royal Society in 1911. In the same year he lectured in Amer- 

 ica and was presented with the Willard Gibbs Medal of the Ameri- 

 can Society. In 1914 he gave the Faraday lecture to our own society, 

 and the Tyndall lecture to the Royal Institution. 



Arrhenius liked to acquire knowledge at first hand, and visited 

 many laboratories for this purpose. He spent, for example, three 

 weeks in Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester, working at a prac- 

 tical course in radioactivity under Geiger. At the end of a week 

 he had started a research on the solubility of active deposits, and was 

 with difficulty dragged away from his electroscope to witness some 

 of Jacques Loeb's starfish experiments at the marine biological 

 station. 



He devoted a large part of the later years of his life to populariz- 

 ing science. A firm believer in progress through enlightenment, he 

 sought to bring a knowledge of scientific fact and method before 

 the general public. His clear and easy style made his books attrac- 

 tive, though the matters dealt with were often in themselves difficult. 

 The first of these books, Viirldarnas Utveckling (Worlds in the 

 Making), which treats in a popular manner some of the subjects of 

 his Kosmische Pliysik, had an immediate and world-wide success, 

 being translated into all the important European languages. 



Happy in his work and happy in his family life, Arrhenius dur- 

 ing his later years radiated contentment. He was twice married — 

 in 1894 to Sofia Rudbeck, and in 1905 to Maria Johansson. By the 

 first marriage he had one son, Olov Vilhelm Arrhenius, who is 

 known for his work in soil science and agricultural botany, and by 

 the second a son and two daughters. 



His health remained good until the autumn of 1925, and although 

 lie recovered in a remarkable way from the first seizure, he retired 

 from the directorship of the Nobel Institute in February, 1927, when 

 Jie was granted a full pension and the right to remain in the official 

 residence. On October 2, 1927, he died after a week's illness, and 

 was buried in Upsala on the 8th of that month after a solemn 

 service in Stockholm on the previous day. 



Arrhenius was of the old breed of natural philosophers, a true 

 polyhistor, devoted to science at large. Being endowed with a 

 memory both tenacious and accurate, he had a marvelous command 

 of scientific fact. He was, however, no unimaginative empiric; 

 his synthetic fancy played over the vast store of knowledge and 

 sought relations between apparently isolated regions. In conse- 

 quence, his original ideas were concerned with borderland sciences — 

 physical chemistry, cosmic physics, geophysics, immunochemistry. 



