WILLARD GIBBS 353 



Professor X: "Sie haben eine Akademie der Wissenschaften 

 in New Haven, nicht wahr?" (You have an Academy of Science 

 in New Haven, have you not?) 



Gibbs (innocently) : " Ja wohl ! Davon bin ich Mitglied." (Yes 

 indeed. I am a member of it.) 



Professor X: "Ach! so. Die Mitgliedershaft wird wohl ziem- 

 lich ausgebreitet sein." (The membership must be rather exten- 

 sive.) 



American scientists are much given to complaining that their 

 work does not receive due recognition in Europe. This is doubt- 

 less true of the ordinary run of scientific papers, but this case, like 

 some others, shows that really important work may be better 

 appreciated abroad than at home. If American chemists had 

 begun research twenty-five years ago on the lines indicated by 

 Gibbs, they would have led the world in the development of 

 physical chemistry, which now they, in imitation of European 

 scientists, have recently taken up. Yale graduates who went 

 abroad to study chemistry were sometimes first set to study the 

 work of Gibbs whom they had never known at college. 



But at the time when it was published there were few chemists 

 in this country sufficiently familiar with higher mathematics to 

 understand and utilize Gibbs' work. As we have seen, chemistry 

 differed from physics in having no general laws capable of mathe- 

 matical expression, and the chemist got along very well in his work 

 if he knew arithmetic as far as percentage, so that he could calculate 

 his analyses. It was not likely then that he would take the trouble 

 to master a mathematical paper covering 300 pages and including 

 over 700 equations, in which only a few simple chemicals such as 

 salt, water, sulphur and hydriodic acid, are mentioned by way of 

 illustration. But now as Le Chatelier says, "the algebraist with 

 his formulas has drawn the attention of the chemists with their 

 crucibles and conquered their contempt for integrals." 



It is difficult to convey to the lay reader any clear idea of the 

 contents of the paper "On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Sub- 

 stances." Perhaps some insight may be afforded by using the 

 words of the Dutch chemist, Bakhuis Roozeboom, who was one 

 of the first to realize the importance of the work. He says that it 



