650 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 621. 



•y^ay— who can say it will not come to pass ? 



Again, your physicists, unsatisfied with 

 the worlds of knowledge they have already 

 conquered, earnestly seeking for others to 

 vanquish, have brought to light a new form 

 of energy, which they call radioactivity. 

 They seem to have well nigh demolished 

 the Daltonian atom as the ultimate particle 

 of matter, and now they talk to us of ions, 

 of electrons which we laymen are permitted 

 to call corpuscles. 



We learn from these men of the uni- 

 versity that an atom of hydrogen can 

 be broken up into nearly a thousand cor- 

 puscles, an atom of mercury into 200,000 

 corpuscles, that the atom of radium has 

 stored within it an energy of which our 

 older science did not dream. 



Furthermore, our advanced physicists, 

 or at least some of them, have relegated 

 matter to a new field, and they tell us that 

 negative electricity is matter, i. e., that 

 electrons and matter are intercontravert- 

 ible terms! 



Taking these wonderfully interesting 

 theories, combining them with Arrhenius's 

 theory of the pressure of waves of radiant 

 energy from the sun, a new, a beautiful 

 solution comes to us of the origin of the 

 sun's corona, of the zodiacal light, of 

 comets' tails — of the aurora and all cor- 

 related phenomena. Surely we appear to 

 be bordering on Kantian transcendentalism 

 when our physicists have reached such 

 dizzy heights. 



Lord Kelvin says of the atom: "If we 

 raise a drop of water to the size of the 

 earth and raise the atom in the same pro- 

 portion, then will it be some place between 

 the size of a marble and a cricket ball." 



If you fill a tiny vessel one centimeter 

 cube with hydrogen corpuscles you can place 

 therein, in round numbers, five hundred 

 and twenty-five octillions of them. If these 

 corpuscles are allowed to run out of the 



vessel at the rate of one thousand per sec- 

 ond it will require seventeen quintillions of 

 years to empty it. Such a computation 

 seems almost like trifling with science, in- 

 deed apparently trifling with the human 

 intellect, but it is with these subtle theories 

 that our physicists are wrestling, delving 

 into the innermost chamber of the infinitely 

 minute, to build for us, upon the most 

 stable foundation, the macrocosm of a 

 universe. 



Lehigh has not been slow in its depart- 

 ment of physical science, and her alumni 

 can well be proud of the splendid set of 

 text-books on physics that have come from 

 within her walls. 



But I dare not dwell longer on this fas- 

 cinating theme, or I shall lead you into a 

 maze from which there is no egress. 



I have now taken so much time that it is 

 impossible to give more than a brief review 

 of other fields of work which have been so 

 well cultivated by the university men of 

 the past quarter century. 



Chemistry, that all-important science — 

 so closely related to every industry — be it 

 of the farm, the workshop, the sanitation 

 and water supply of cities, aye a thousand 

 and one things in which the comfort and 

 conveniences of life are concerned, the uni- 

 versity man has taken hold of and devel- 

 oped to an astonishing degree. In one of 

 these phases of the chemist's work your 

 own past president Drown took a great and 

 abiding interest, namely, that of the water 

 supply of towns and cities. At the New 

 Orleans meeting of the American Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science, held 

 in January of this year. Professor Kinni- 

 cut, of the Worcester Polytechnic Insti- 

 tute, paid a high tribute to the great value 

 of President Drown 's labor in this field of 

 research. 



Read over the list of famous chemists of 

 later years, such men as Hoffman, Perkin, 



