362 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



in the Popular Science Monthly, May, 1909 et seq., Dr. Fielding 

 H. Garrison defines the characteristics of his genius in the 

 following language: 



" Ostwald, in his interesting Biologie des Naturforschers, has 

 divided men of science into two classes: The classicists (Klas- 

 siker), men like Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, Harvey, who, deal- 

 ing with a limited number of ideas in their work, seek formal 

 perfection and attain it, leaving no school of followers behind 

 them, but only the effect of the work itself; and the romanticists 

 (Romantiker) , who like Liebig, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, 

 are bold explorers in unknown fields, men fertile in ideas, leav- 

 ing many followers and many loose ends of unfinished work 

 which others complete. In the logical perfection of his work 

 and in his unusual talent for developing a theme in the most 

 comprehensive and exhaustive manner, Gibbs was emphatically 

 the Klassiker. But in the scientific achievement of his early 

 manhood he showed something of the spirit of the Romantiker 

 also. His mathematical theory of chemical equilibrium was, 

 far in advance of any experimental procedure known or con- 

 templated at the time of its publication, and, although some 

 of his predecessors, like James Thomson, Massieu, Horstmann, 

 had come within sight of the new land and even skirted its 

 shores, Gibbs, with the adventurous spirit of the true pioneer, 

 not only conquered and explored it, but systematically sur- 

 veyed it, living to see part of his territory occupied by a thriving 

 band of workers, the physical chemists. Cayley, in his report 

 on theoretical dynamics in 1857, expressed his conviction that 

 the science of statics ' does not admit of much ulterior develop- 

 ment.' The work of Gibbs has added to it the immense field 

 of chemical equilibrium and wherever 'phases,' 'heterogeneous 

 systems,' 'chemical and thermodynamic potentials,' or 'criti- 

 cal states' are mentioned he has left his impress upon modern 

 scientific thought. It is not without reason then, that Ostwald 

 has called this mathematician ' the founder of chemical energet- 

 ics,' asserting that 'he has given new form and substance to 

 chemistry for another century at least.' " 



