124 
likely that some of you have never hap- 
pened to hear his name—the name of 
Michael Wassiliewitsch Lomonossoft. 
Even in Russia, although his work in 
literary and linguistic lines, his success as 
a man of affairs and his investigations as a 
geographer and a meteorologist had won 
for him enduring fame, the fact that he 
was primarily a chemist had been com- 
pletely forgotten. It was Menschutkin? 
who, a few years ago, rediscovered him as 
a chemist, reprinted in Russian his scat- 
tered memoirs and collected all that could 
be found of his manuscripts, letters and 
laboratory note-books. 
Although trained—chiefly in Germany 
—hby, and along with, men who ardently 
supported the current views, he seems with 
astonishing ease to have thrown off the 
prejudices of his contemporaries, and to 
have achieved a perfectly independent 
view-point of his own. At that time, the 
emission of light-matter explained the phe- 
nomena of light. Largely through the 
enormous influence of Newton’s selection 
of the emission theory in preference to the 
wave theory (first developed by Huygens 
in 1690), this remained the accepted ex- 
planation until after a hard struggle 
against the influence of Laplace (1817) 
and others, who were unconyvineed, with 
the explanation of the phenomenon of 
polarization by Fresnel, the ether-wave 
theory finally triumphed. But Lomonos- 
soff discusses (1753-56) the possible mo- 
tions of ether—progressive, rotatory and 
wave-like—identifies the last as the basis 
of light, and goes in great detail into the 
nature of ether, and the properties of light- 
waves and the mode of their propagation. 
In Lomonossoff’s day, heat was also a 
2<¢NT. W. Lomonossoff, as a Physical Chemist,’’ 
St. Petersburg, 1904. See also an article by 
Mensehutkin, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 4, 
203. 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 891 
form of matter. .The classical experiment 
of Rumford was made (1798) thirty years 
after his death. But, so strong was the 
prejudice, that, even then, the proof (by 
quantitative experiments) that heat could 
be generated without limit from friction, 
under conditions such that the addition of 
any substance or form of matter was im- 
possible, did not carry conviction. Lavoi- 
sier believed (with some hesitation, it is 
true) in an imponderable matiére de cha- 
leur. It was not until after the work of 
Mayer (1842), who was at first persecuted 
for his views, and especially after the dem- 
onstration by Joule (1855-60) that heat 
and work were mutually and quantita- 
tively inter-convertible, that the theory 
that heat was matter finally disappeared. 
Yet Lomonossoff, more than a century 
earlier (1744-47), in a paper on “‘The 
causes of Heat and Cold,’’ discusses in 
detail the experimental evidence that mo- 
tion is a source of heat, and that molecular 
motions are caused by heating. Radiant 
heat, of which then little was known, was 
transmitted by motions of the ether, which 
he believed to be of the rotatory variety. 
In all his papers, heat is always a mode 
of molecular motion. The paper named 
was the subject of vigorous discussion, par- 
ticularly in Germany, and, after the views 
contained in it had been sufficiently abused, 
they were consigned to oblivion. 
The kinetic-molecular theory of gases 
used to be attributed to Kroénig (1856) and 
Clausius (1857). But Lord Rayleigh dis- 
covered in the archives of the Royal So- 
ciety a very complete form of it, con- 
tributed by Waterston in 1845. The state 
of public opinion among physicists, even 
then, a century after Lomonossoft’s work, 
may be judged from the fact that the com- 
mittee of the society considered the content 
of the paper to be nonsensical, and refused 
to permit its public presentation. Lomo- 
