THEODORE WILLIAM RICHARDS — BAXTER 739 



to intensive study in one institution, followed by a half year of 

 peripatetic study, was one which he always advocated afterwards to 

 students with a similar opportunity as offering on the whole the 

 greatest good for the time available. 



In the fall of 1889 he returned to Harvard as assistant in quantita- 

 tive analysis, never again to break his connection with the university 

 as a teacher. Promotion to an instructorship came in 1891 and to an 

 assistant professorship in 1894. In 1901 he received the very unusual 

 honor, at that time, of a call to a chair in a European university. 

 The University of Gottingen invited Richards to accept a full 

 professorship in chemistry, with only nominal teaching duties be- 

 yond the conducting of investigation. To a man impatient to make 

 rapid progress in research, but working with a heavy teaching load, 

 in a laboratory far from ideal, such an opportunity was tempting in 

 the extreme. Fortunately Harvard appreciated the value of the 

 promising young scientist and rose to the occasion with the offer of 

 a fu]l professorship and an agreement of a drastic reduction in the 

 amount of teaching and administrative duties expected. Upon the 

 retirement of Professor Jackson in 1912, Richards was appointed to 

 the Erving professorship, founded in 1792, the oldest endowed 

 professorship in chemistry in Harvard University. 



Immediately after his return from Europe to Harvard in 1889 

 Richards reentered the field of chemical investigation in which he 

 had already made a beginning, and which was to occupy a large part 

 of his attention during the remainder of his life. Always convinced 

 that only through a precise knowledge of the properties of matter 

 was progress in chemical science to be made, he was fond of making 

 the following quotation from Plato : " If from any art you take away 

 that which concerns weighing, measuring, and arithmetic, how little 

 is left of that art !" Furthermore, at that time the atomic weights 

 and the periodic law seemed to him to offer more promise of con- 

 tributing to the understanding of the laws of the universe than any 

 other field of chemistry. In a paper printed in 1910 he says : 



But some may contend that the very exact determination of these quantities 

 is after all an abstract and academic question, not of great practical sig- 

 nificance. How will this remote philosophical knowledge yield any practical use? 

 Who can tell? Faraday had no conception of the electric locomotive or the 

 power plants of Niagara when he performed those crucial experiments with 

 magnets and wires that laid the basis for the modern dynamo. When man- 

 kind discovers the fundamental laws underlying any set of phenomena, these 

 phenomena come in much larger measure than before under his control and are 

 applicable for his service. Until we understand the laws all depends upon 

 chance. Hence, merely from the practical point of view of the progress of 

 humanity, the exact understanding of the laws of nature is one of the most 

 important of all the problems presented to man ; and the unknown laws under- 

 lying the nature of the elements are obviously among the most fundamental of 

 these laws of nature. In brief, that is the reason why more than 20 years ago 



