786 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



lamented Meyerhofl'er. Among others one can not pass in silence 

 Ernest Cohen, formerly his assistant in Amsterdam and to-day pro- 

 fessor at Utrecht, the most faithful and best authorized interpreter 

 of the thought of the master ; from his loving activity we expect the 

 work which shall make the figure of the latter live again in all its 

 details before us.^ Heinrich Goldschmidt and G. Bredig, now pro- 

 fessors at Christiania and at Zurich, each spent several years in his 

 laboratory in Amsterdam. 



The writer of these lines can not help referring, in thought, 

 toward that laboratory at Wilmersdorf, near Berlin, in which he 

 had the pleasure of working during the years 1900-1901, It was a 

 little laboratory located in a rented house conveniently furnished 

 for the researches which were made in it (on the Stassfurt salts), 

 but not for anything else; beside van't Hoff, Meyerhofl'er, and an 

 appointed assistant there was not room for more than five or six 

 students. There never was, I believe, a more international and poly- 

 glot laboratory; one may say that, except the French, all nationali- 

 ties have been there. The meetings with the master were frequent 

 and familiarly cordial. Certainly the day of the announcement of 

 his death none of us who had been permitted there could help think- 

 ing, with a melancholy not without tenderness, of the days which 

 passed by in the peaceful work at Wilmersdorf. 



But beyond these details it may be interesting to inquire into 

 his manner of procedure in intellectual work and his attitude in 

 regard to some of the great questions which agitate and divide the 

 scientific world. 



His mind was first of all synthetic and coordinative : his work, 

 by choice, always consisted in studying a large number of facts in 

 order to make out their reciprocal relations and express them in 

 general laws. Certainly in him, as in the case with most inventive 

 minds, the result was already present when the demonstration was 

 not yet finished — another proof of the fact that progress, based on a 

 flight of the imagination rather than on a series of successive and 

 maturely considered steps, has an essential part in the development 

 of science. That was the favorite thesis of van't Hoff. 



But he was perfectly aware that the success of such a flight does 

 not remove from the exact scientist the obligation of returning and 

 uniting, by a passageway offering every security, the point attained 

 with the shore Avhich had served as a point of departure. 



And, indeed, one of the characteristics which strike us in his work 

 is that when he announced a theory he announced it already com- 

 plete. Let us consider his three principal works — stereochemistry. 

 the studies in chemical dynamics, and the theory of solutions; each 



* This expectation has meantime been fulfilled ; see " Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff, Sein 

 Leben and Wirken, by Ernst Cohen, xv, 638 pp. Leipzig, 1912. 



