SECTION B—CHEMISTRY. 
PHYSICAL METHODS IN CHEMISTRY 
ADDRESS BY 
PROF. T. MARTIN LOWRY, C.B.E., Didc.,, F.R.»., 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
CURRENT EVENTS. 
IN reviewing the development of chemistry in this country during the 
past year, I must place in the forefront the political events which have 
turned so many of our most welcome visitors into residents. It is 
impossible as yet to appreciate fully the contribution thus made to the 
advancement of science in this country, and it would perhaps be invidious 
to mention any names ; but I must make an exception in order to say that 
in Cambridge we were just beginning to discover how great a chemist 
and how generous a colleague we had found in Haber, when he succumbed 
to a heart-weakness of long standing, less than a week after I had the 
privilege of presiding at his first public lecture. 
I should also like to mention the holding of the 59th and 60th General 
Discussions of the Faraday Society in Cambridge and in Oxford respec- 
tively, since it was my privilege nearly thirty years ago to initiate the first 
three of these discussions, as a means of providing an appropriate environ- 
ment for a modest paper of my own on ‘ Osmotic Pressure,’ and for papers 
with Mr. Bousfield on the ‘Hydrate Theory of Ionisation,’ and on 
“Liquid Water a Ternary Mixture.’ 
INTERPENETRATION OF CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. 
One of the most important features of scientific progress during the 
present century, and especially since the war, has been the renewal of the 
old intimate fellowship between chemistry and physics, which was 
characteristic of the earlier days, when Cavendish and Faraday were 
masters of both subjects and competent to make important discoveries 
in either. ‘The subsequent segregation, which resulted from the growing 
specialisation of these two subjects of research, tended to produce 
chemists who were no longer competent physicists, and physicists who 
had little or no sympathy with chemical problems, to the great loss of 
both sciences. Indeed, when I was a student, the leading physical 
chemist was one who ‘ used to boast that he had never performed an 
