822 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 491. 



the various lines of work wHcli constituted 

 the new science. 



This, however, is all introductory to Ost- 

 wald's greatest work. In 188Y he was called 

 to Leipzig to the chair of physical chemistry 

 just vacated by Gustav Wiedemann. To him 

 as director of ' Des zweiten ehemischen Labo- 

 ratoriums ' students came from all parts of 

 the world. Through these, and with his own 

 hands, an enormous amount of work was done. 

 These investigations, which were published, 

 when completed, in the Zeitschrift, have since 

 been collected and comprise several large vol- 

 umes. This large amount of work was done 

 under very unfavorable conditions. A small 

 laboratory, poorly lighted and poorly equipped 

 with apparatus and conveniences, may be said 

 to describe fairly the old laboratory of Ostwald 

 in Leipzig. 



The cosmopolitan character of the Leipzig 

 laboratory in the nineties, when it was the 

 good fortune of the writer to have studied 

 with Ostwald, is shown by the fact that of 

 the students who were following physical 

 chemistry as their major subject, the following 

 nationalities were represented: Germany, 

 America, Canada, England, Scotland, Bel- 

 gium and Russia. Indeed, there were more 

 Americans working with Ostwald at that time 

 than there were of any other nationality, in- 

 cluding Germans. 



This condition of things is all changed now. 

 The fame of Ostwald as investigator and 

 teacher drew such a large number of students 

 that the old quarters became entirely inade- 

 equate. A fine, new Physikalisch-ehemisches 

 Institut has been built for Ostwald, and this 

 has now become the home of the ' Leipzig 

 School ' of physical chemistry. 



The most striking characteristics of Ostwald 

 are his untiring industry, his fertility in ideas 

 and his absolute unselfishness. As an illus- 

 tration of his power of work, Walden points 

 out that his collected works number already 

 more than 16,000 pages, and in addition to 

 this he has directed probably more than one 

 hundred investigations; has edited the Zeit- 

 schrift, which is now in its forty-eighth vol- 

 ume, and has founded the Annalen der Phi- 

 losophie. 



As illustrating Ostwald's power to work, the 

 writer recalls returning to Leipzig with Ost- 

 wald from Berlin in 1894, when van't HofE de- 

 livered his now famous ' 94 ' lecture before 

 the Berlin Chemical Society. It was between 

 two and three in the morning when Leipzig 

 was reached. We learned nest morning that 

 Ostwald had not retired on returning home, 

 but had spent the remainder of the night in 

 developing some idea that had occurred to him 

 during the journey. 



The fertility of Ostwald's mind in new 

 ideas can not have failed to impress any one 

 who had been with him even for a short 

 period, and also the unusual freedom with 

 which suggestions, often of very great im- 

 portance, were made to any one who had the 

 desire and ability to work them out in the 

 laboratory. And when the work was done the 

 student was told to publish the investigation 

 as if the whole was his own. The result is 

 that a large part of the work done in Ostwald's 

 laboratory does not bear his name, although 

 the original suggestion came from him, and 

 every stage of the investigation was under his 

 daily scrutiny. 



All in all, it is difiicult to overestimate what 

 Ostwald has already done for chemical science. 

 He is the organizer of the modern school of 

 physical chemistry. But he has gone much 

 farther and shown how the generalizations of 

 the new physical chemistry can be applied to 

 general inorganic chemistry, by both the in- 

 vestigator and the teacher. It is not too much 

 to say that he has inaugurated a new day into 

 the field of general chemistry. 



Walden concludes his interesting life of this 

 great man by calling attention to Ostwald's 

 love of art; not as an admirer of finished pic- 

 tures in a gallery, but as a painter of them. 

 Indeed, one of Ostwald's ovm pastels is repro- 

 duced in Walden's book. 



It is interesting to learn not only of the 

 serious work of a leader in natural science, 

 but also how he spends his leisure. In Ostwald 

 we have the love of the scientifically exact, 

 combined with that of the purely beautiful in 

 nature. 



Harry C. Jones. 



