JUNE 7, 1901.] 
be supplemented by a brief reference, at 
least, to his more important characteristics. 
He was not a man who desired fame, but 
devoted his whole life to one ideal—the 
discovery of truth. Although connected 
_ with a comparatively small institution, he 
never lost his enthusiasm for his work, and 
one of his very last investigations, on the 
lowering of the freezing-point of water pro- 
duced by non-electrolytes, probably con- 
tains the most accurate measurements of 
these values which have ever,been made. 
Raoult as a man seems to have combined 
most of those qualities which are so much 
admired. We have abundant evidence of 
his kind-heartedness and genial disposition. 
A letter from his pen was always an in- 
spiration to more strenuous effort in re- 
search, and invariably left the impression 
that the highest aim of man should ever be 
to increase the sum of human knowledge. 
In Raoult not only France has lost her 
most prominent physical chemist, but the 
world has lost one of the leading men of 
science. 
Harry C. Jones. 
CHARLES HERMITE. 
Tue fourteenth of January, 1901, should 
be marked with a black stone in the annals 
of mathematics. Then the eminent geom- 
eter, the incomparable man, the great Her- 
mite, one of the glories most pure of France, 
was lost to science, and implacable death 
threw into mourning his family, his friends 
and his admirers. : 
As mathematician of the first rank he 
leaves to the glory of his country and of 
all humanity a superb scientific monument 
erected in sixty years, completely dedi- 
cated to ‘his dear analyse’ (to use one of 
his phrases) and to preparing, by the infu- 
sion of his genius placed at the service of 
teaching, that galaxy of illustrious mathe- 
maticians who now so much adorn our sis- 
ter nation. Like Sturm, he united in an 
SCIENCE 
883 
extraordinary degree the qualities of a pro- 
fessor who wins the love of his disciples to 
those of one who inculeates the love of 
science for science. 
Endowed, like his compatriots Pascal 
and Clairaut, with singular precocity, we 
see him, yet a scholar of the lyceum Louis 
le Grand, win the prize for mathematics 
with a noteworthy thesis, and shortly after, 
as student of the Polytechnic School, at- 
tract the attention of Jacobi with his first 
works and place himself as of right in the 
first rank among the analysts of Europe. 
It is not our object to make a minute 
analysis of the works of the great geome- 
ter, to which would be necessary time and 
competence that we lack. Our aim is much 
more modest; we seek to render what is 
heartfelt homage to the man we have so 
deeply venerated and from whom we have 
received infinite proofs of benevolence dur- 
ing the fifteen or sixteen years that we have 
had the honor to possess his friendship, in 
sO many ways precious. 
It is not possible, speaking of Charles 
Hermite, to fail to say how in the higher - 
analysis, in algebra and in the theory of 
numbers, one encounters everywhere the 
footprints of his giant tread. How could 
we leave unmentioned his memoir on the 
exponential function, where in demonstrat- 
ing the transcendence of the number e he 
opens the way which eleven years after 
conducted Lindemann to the demonstration 
of the analogous property of z, solving in 
negative form the celebrated problem which 
for two thousand years had in vain fatigued 
geometers ? 
Nor can we pass in silence the enormous 
contribution which Hermite brought to the 
Theory of Forms: his law of reciprocity, his 
admirable researches on associate covari- 
ants, his work on quintic forms, his memoir 
on the equation of the fifth degree and his 
celebrated theorem having Sturm’s as co- 
rollary. 
