June i8, 1903] 



NATURE 



157 



On Tuesday evening, June 2, President Witt 

 welcomed the members in German, French, and 

 English. The formal opening meeting on the next 

 morning, at which Prince Frederick Henry repre- 

 sented the Emperor, was addressed by Prof. VVict; 

 Secretary of State Count Posadowsky-Wehner, on 

 behalf of the Empire ; the Prussian Minister of Educa- 

 tion, Dr. Studt; Mayor Dr. Rei.cke, on behalf of the 

 City of Berlin ; representatives of the learned and 

 technical bodies which had taken part in the organisa- 

 tion ; and the official delegates, Dr. Tilden speaking 

 for Great Britain. As thirty Governments had sent 

 delegates, the representative of Switzerland, Prof. 

 Lunge, was heard as speaker for the minor States. 

 There was a beautiful passage in President Witt's 

 eloquent welcome : The flames of special research 

 burn in the many chapels, and the Congress unites all 

 the worshippers of the one universal science. 

 Mayor Reicke also earned warm applause. The 

 honorary president of the Congress, the veteran 

 chemist Prof. Clemens Winkler, was not well enough 

 to attend. The vice-presidents were Drs. H. Botlinger, 

 M Delbriick, C. von Martius, E. A. Merck. The 

 honorary vice-presidents, Moissan, Meldola, Piutti, 

 and Christomanos, were appointed by acclamation. 



The second plenary meeting on Friday morning was 

 devoted to lectures. H. Moissan demonstrated some 

 of the properties of the alkali hydrides which he has 

 recently prepared. Potassium hydride is a snowy 

 mass, which has to be kept in sealed tubes, and de- 

 composes, when heated, into potassium and hydrogen ; 

 a tube was broken under water to exemplify this. 

 Carbonic acid gas decomposes the mass, but the de- 

 composition does not occur in the second of two tubes 

 joined in series, because the presence of a trace of 

 moisture in the CO^ is necessary, nor does it occur 

 below -650 C. The KH^ does not conduct the 

 electric current, not even when fused, and the 

 hydrogen in these alloys does not behave like a metal 

 any more than it resembles metal in its liquid state. 



Sir William Crookes then gave his discourse on 

 modern views on matter : the realisation of a dream, 

 dealing with speculations which the mysterious radio- 

 active emanations suggest or support, and alluding 

 to a fatal atomic dissociation which works when we 

 brush a piece of glass with silk, and in sunshine and 

 raindrops, in lightning and flames ; protyle the form- 

 less mist, might once more reign supreme. 



J. H. van 't Hoff then explained how the phase-law 

 of Willard Gibbs enables us to understand the form- 

 ation of natural salt deposits, referring to the influence 

 of temperature, pressure, and time; the higher the 

 basicity of the acid and the valency of the metal, the 

 longer can a state of supersaturation exist, and when 

 we have dibasic acids and bivalent metals, the addition 

 of a solid crystal of the respective salt will no longer 

 produce the crystallisation which is instantaneous in 

 the case of Glauber salt. 



The retrospective view of the ammonia-soda process, 

 by E. Solvay (Brussels), did not enter into any detail. 

 In the next lecture, on auto-oxidation, Carl Engler 

 (Karlsruhe) went in a certain measure back to 

 Schonbein's ozone and antozone. Oxygen does not 

 appear to combine in single atoms, but always as a 

 whole molecule, giving an unsaturated compound 

 which yields a peroxide; this peroxide then, by giving 

 off half of its oxygen, forms oxides, and we may dis- 

 tinguish two classes of bodies in this respect. The 

 auto-oxidators bind the oxygen to peroxide and pass 

 half of it on to the acceptor, which itself cannot bind 

 the atmospheric oxygen. We have thus, in the 

 animal and vegetable kingdoms, to which these argu- 

 ments particularly apply, peculiar catalytic processes. 

 Engler made reference to a paper, read by L. Woehler 



NO. 1755, VOL. 68] 



(Karlsruhe), who has extracted 18 per cent, of Pt 

 from spongy platinum, by hydrochloric acid, precipi- 

 tated a protohydrate from the solution, and oxidised 

 platinum, both as foil and sponge, by heating it in 

 oxygen ; a piece of foil absorbed 1-9 per cent, of oxygen 

 in thirty-seven days. 



The last general lecture was given by G. Kraemer, 

 of Berlin, on coal tar researches. 



The concluding plenary meeting had to pass or 

 reject the sectional resolutions which are to be pre- 

 sented to the permanent committee of the International 

 Congresses for Applied Chemistry, and also to select 

 the place for the next meeting. Most of the 

 numerous resolutions, concerning the drawing up of 

 analytical reports, the undesirability of characterising 

 reagents simply as pure, the specialisation of 

 the Trauzl test (explosions within lead chambers), 

 the transport of explosives, a uniform method of 

 compiling statistics of accidents, the soda test 

 of petroleum, the prohibition of additions of starch 

 to press yeast, and other points were approved 

 of without discussion. The electrochemical units, re- 

 commended by Nernst, Warburg, and Strecker, on 

 behalf of the Bunsen Gesellschaft, the Physical 

 Society, and the Elektrotechnische Verein of Berlin, 

 for general use in publications, were adopted by the 

 Congress, with an amendment by A. A. Noyes 

 (Boston) that a committee of the Bunsen Gesellschaft 

 should cooperate with other societies in order to make 

 the system more comprehensive. The proposals of 

 Section xi., legal and economical questions, however, 

 met with opposition. It was not unreasonably com- 

 plained that the resolutions were not in print before 

 the meeting, though they had been published in the 

 daily journals — not always in their final versions, 

 however — and the meeting declined to sanction : that 

 the registration as trade marks of words is not to be 

 considered illegal for the reason that those words had 

 previously been used in a definite sense. The assembly 

 agreed to the general prohibition of white phosphorus 

 matches, and recommended proper care of the em- 

 ployes in chemical works as a moral obligation the 

 observance of which would serve the manufacturer's 

 own interest. The two International Commissions, for 

 analysis (created in 1900, chairman, Prof. Lunge) and 

 for manures and fodders (created in 1898, chairman, 

 Dr. von Grueber, of Malmo) were reappointed. The 

 sugar chemists wished to settle their analytical methods 

 for themselves. A new commission is to be elected for 

 compiling a codex alimentarius. 



The remarkable skill, tact, and firmness with which 

 President Witt guided the assembly in these dis- 

 cussions were again called into requisition when 

 the place of the next meeting was to be decided. On 

 behalf of the Italian Government, the City of Rome, 

 and the learned societies of Italy, Prof. Paterno di 

 Sessa invited the congress to Rome. In accordance 

 vtith a resolution unanimously passed by the British 

 members of the Congress in a special meeting, at 

 which thirty-eight members were present, Mr. I. 

 Levinstein, president of the Society of Chemical 

 Industry, asked the Congress to come to London in 

 1906, on behalf of that society and other societies in- 

 terested; Dr. Tilden, the British delegate, supported 

 the invitation. Both Italy and Great Britain had 

 previously offered hospitalitj to the Congress, Italy, it 

 would appear, twice, England once. The question 

 was finally decided by a regular division, after the 

 manner of the German Reichstag, when 294 members 

 voted for Rome and 274 for London. 



The sectional proceedings were conducted on the 

 linos of the German Naturforscher-Versammlung. 

 The presidents of the eleven sections and four sub- 

 sections were almost all Berlin men. Their names 



