744 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1091 



In felicitating the chancellor and trus- 

 tees, it is not necessary to point out that a 

 university's greatness is not determined 

 by the magnificence of its plant, its athletic 

 prowess, or the size of its student body, but 

 by the number and importance of its grad- 

 uate schools; and that the standing of a 

 graduate school, in the judgment of those 

 whose opinion is really worth having, is 

 measured by the amount and quality of its 

 output of genuinely original investigation. 

 The extent of the assistance which a uni- 

 versity secures from its surrounding com- 

 munity in the creation of such splendid 

 graduate schools as we see here, is not in- 

 frequently the reflection of the attitude of 

 the university authorities themselves toward 

 such work; and the city of Pittsburgh is 

 indeed fortunate to have at the head of its 

 famous university a chancellor and trustees 

 who know how to prize original scientific 

 investigation at its real worth, and under 

 whose fostering care and guidance it is cer- 

 tain to have fuU opportunity for develop- 

 ment. 



To the staff of noted teachers and inves- 

 tigators already connected with this uni- 

 versity, Dr. RosanofE has been called, and I 

 bring to him the congratulations of our 

 chemical department at Columbia and our 

 best wishes for a long, happy and useful 

 career. 



He is an unusually gifted man — chemist, 

 physicist, mathematician, linguist — and in- 

 tends to devote his versatile talents to the 

 difficult, but very important field of 

 physico-organie chemistry. He should be 

 a very happy man to-night, for I know that 

 it has been his ambition to be permitted to 

 devote his life to research in pure chemis- 

 try, and happiness has been defined as the 

 quotient obtained by dividing our ambition 

 by our achievements. There is no doubt 

 that he will do all in his power to widen 

 the boundaries of knowledge in his chosen 



field, and that he wiU succeed, through his 

 own labors and those of his junior col- 

 leagues, research associates and students, 

 in bringing honor and prestige to the chair. 



I would gladly explain to you the impor- 

 tance of the numerous discoveries he has 

 already made, but time does not permit, 

 and much of it, I fear, would be about as 

 fascinating to the uninitiated as an attempt 

 to expound the fine points of Sanskrit 

 syntax. 



Accordingly, I will limit myself to a few 

 of his more notable contributions. 



Fractional distillation is an ancient proc- 

 ess, but it has remained largely an empirical 

 one. True, its practical applications have 

 developed and experience has shown the 

 particular value of various forms of dis- 

 tilling apparatus, but the underlying theory 

 has continued more or less in dispute and 

 it has been impossible to calculate accu- 

 rately in advance the correct arrangement 

 of the distilling heads necessary to realize 

 a maximum separation of the components 

 of a liquid mixture; the only way to find 

 out having been to assemble an outfit and 

 make a trial run. Professor Rosanoff's 

 studies of the problem have convinced him 

 that the conclusion arrived at by previous 

 investigators to the effect that a single 

 regulated still-head sufficed to separate 

 completely binary mixtures was not in ac- 

 cord with the facts. By an application of 

 the theory of partial vapor pressures he 

 has corrected this error and shown that not 

 one, but a series of still-heads is necessary, 

 the temperature of each of which bears a 

 definite mathematical relation to that of 

 every other one. This has been experimen- 

 tally confirmed very many times during the 

 past three or four years, and it would ap- 

 pear that research in pure chemistry has 

 at last placed this age-old process upon a 

 firm scientific basis. The American Chem- 

 ical Society recognized the fine quality of 



