14 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1201 



entiate between these two classes then we may 

 find names for those systems which now seem 

 to have properties which place them in neither 

 of the above. 



Before concluding, attention is directed to 

 the irritating, although not very serious, mis- 

 take in the translations of the German terms 

 " disperse " and " dispersions Mittel " by some 

 authors. The German adjective " disperse " 

 is " dispersed " in English, not " disperse," and 

 " disperse Phase " is " dispersed phase," while 

 " dispersions Mittel " is " dispersion medium " 

 and not " dispersion means." These mistakes 

 are like the old one of translating " Wander- 

 ung der lonen " " wandering of the ions " in- 

 stead of " migration of ions.' ' 



Arthur W. Thomas 

 Department or Chemistet, 

 Columbia University 



ADDRESS AT THE FUNERAL SERVICES 

 OF JOSEPH YOUNG BERGEN 



I HAVE known Mr. Bergen for nearly thirty 

 years, and for a considerable time I was inti- 

 mately associated with him in the authorship 

 of a book, a test -book of physics. He did not 

 begin his scientific work as a physicist; he be- 

 gan it as a chemist, and he did not end it as 

 a physicist; he ended it as a botanist. But 

 these changes in the subject of his labors, like 

 the changes in his place of residence — from 

 the middle west to New England, then to Italy, 

 then back to New England — came from no 

 fickleness of interest or infirmity of purpose. 

 They were the result of certain hard condi- 

 tions working on a man of extraordinary ver- 

 satility, of extraordinary capacity, of extraor- 

 dinary devotion to high ideals. 



As a teacher he was not content merely to 

 hold a place; he was receptive, active-minded, 

 original; his alertness of observation, his 

 catholicity of interest, his energy of imagina- 

 tion, enabled him to take the dry, dull mat- 

 ters of daily experience and kindle them into 

 a source of illumination and vivifying power. 

 As a vpriter of books he was not satisfied to 

 give the public of his readers merely what it 

 wanted. In physics and later in botany he 



took a large part in a great revolutionary- 

 movement affecting the teaching of science 

 in all the secondary schools of this country, 

 so that his name became familiar to all the 

 progressive teachers of physics or teachers of 

 botany throughout the land. And in those 

 other writings, of a less formal character, in 

 which he and Mrs. Bergen cooperated with 

 perfect sympathy, there was a solidity of sub- 

 stance and a quality of form that com- 

 manded, I believe, the respect and the approval 

 of profound scholars. 



Nor was this all. What a fine, brave thing 

 it was for a man of middle life, with an assured 

 position as a teacher and with little financial 

 assurance elsewhere, to give up this position 

 and go to Italy, in order to pursue his scien- 

 tific studies in their higher aspect, the aspect 

 of original research, and to give his wife the 

 physical conditions of life which she needed 

 and for which she longed. And how finely, 

 how bravely, he bore the care, the anxiety, the 

 sorrow, that come to all of us in some measure 

 and that came to him, it might seem, almost 

 beyond measure. 



With this character and this career, what 

 manner of man did he seem to those who met 

 and talked with him ? I remember him vividly 

 as I used to see him twenty-five years ago, the 

 tall, spare, slightly bending figure, the long, 

 swift, gliding stride, the abundant tawny hair 

 and beard, the great brow jutting over the 

 resolute, patient, illuminated face. And what 

 was his manner of conversation? He talked 

 freely and of many things, but not in common- 

 places. It was not that he avoided common- 

 places; they did not occur to him; he had not 

 a commonplace mind. If one was in the 

 mood to indulge in the ordinary gossip of the 

 day, one was not in condition to sustain 

 worthily a conversation with him. 



But on one matter, one great matter, he 

 never, so far as I can now recall, spoke to me. 

 He was the son of a minister, and he once 

 described to me with a certain grimness of 

 humor some of the trials of a minister's fam- 

 ily; but of religion, of religious faith or 

 creed, he did not speak. He may have had a 

 feeling, since I was a constant church-goer 



