JANUARY 26, 1912] 
nossoft’s paper, read before the Academy 
of St. Petersburg in 1744, nearly suffered 
the same fate, for it was withheld from 
publication for three years. Starting with 
the view of Daniel Bernoulli (1738), to the 
effect that the pressure of gases was due to 
the impacts of their particles, Lomonossoff 
proceeded to develop ideas very much like 
those now held. According to him, for 
example, a rise in temperature caused in- 
ereased motion of the particles, and re- 
sulted therefore in increased pressure. 
His theory differs from ours mainly in the 
fact that rotatory motions played a large 
part, and that the molecules had rough sur- 
faces. Incidentally he poimts out that 
there is no limit to the possible amount of 
motion, and therefore no maximum of tem- 
perature, but that there is a minimum of 
motion, when the latter becomes zero, and 
there must therefore be a minimum of tem- 
perature. In a later paper (1750) he 
proves by his hypothesis that the pressure 
should be, as it was then known to be, in- 
versely proportional to the volume. And 
he goes further, for, with surprising in- 
sight, he shows that, with increasing pres- 
sure, this relation will no longer hold, since 
the volumes of the particles themselves are 
not diminished. The reputed discoverer of 
this consequence of the theory is Dupré 
(who was thus anticipated by 115 years), 
and in 1873 Van der Waals finally put the 
same fact into definite form. 
In all this, it must not be supposed that 
Lomonossoff was simply a reasoner, much 
less a speculator. The discussion is loaded 
with a wealth of experimental facts, many 
of them ascertained by himself. It is espe- 
cially noteworthy, also, that his experi- 
ments, almost without exception, were 
quantitative. When we remember that the 
balance is a stubborn instrument, and that 
its evidence always went contrary to the 
conelusions of those who pinned their faith 
SCIENCE 
125 
to heat-matter and phlogiston, we perceive 
how completely his habits of work and at- 
titude of mind were out of harmony with 
those of his contemporaries, and how start- 
lingly independent were his modern ways 
of experimenting and reasoning. 
Before turning to the part of his work 
that was more especially of a chemical and 
physico-chemical nature, a few words about 
his career may be of interest. He was 
born of peasant parents—Russian peasant 
parents of the early eighteenth century— 
about the year 1711, and in a village forty- 
five miles from Archangel. Opportunities 
for education there were none. Finally, 
at the age of nineteen, he reversed the pro- 
cedure of the typical boy, and ran away, to 
go to school. At 24, he left the school in 
Moscow to attend the lectures of the pro- 
fessors in the Academy of Sciences in St. 
Petersburg. At twenty-five he was sent on 
a traveling scholarship to Marburg, where 
he studied chemistry under Wolff. After 
three years, he went to Freiberg, and two 
years later he returned to St. Petersburg. 
In both places, when he moved, the acad- 
emy had to pay the debts that he had in- 
eurred! Upon his return home, he be- 
came adjunct professor at a salary of $900, 
but the academy, being poor in money, 
paid its professors largely by gifts of 
copies of its publications, a sort of product 
for which there is an almost infinitesimally 
slow market. A year later, we find him 
in the university, lecturing in Latin on 
chemistry, geography and the Russian lan- 
guage. lLecturing in Latin upon the Rus- 
sian language to Russian students! Such 
simple, blind devotion to a tradition sur- 
prises us—even when it occurs in a uni- 
versity. His active experimental work as 
a chemist began in 1744, when he was 
thirty-three years of age, and in 1845 he 
was appointed to the professorship of 
chemistry. 
