The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-03-23
THE NEW PUBLICATIONS.
SOME OF THE LATEST BOOKS OF
 THE SEASON

Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs has just been issued in two volumes by Longmans, Green and Company New York A highly appreciative review of this work of our distinguished towns man and Yale professor, whose death was a distinct loss to the scientific world, appeared recently in the New York Evening Post, and is in full as follows:
 That Josiah Willard Gibbs advanced science the world over more than 1t has ever been given to any other American researcher to do, can hardly be questioned He published but one separate book, his "Elementary Princi- pies in Statistical Mechanics (Charles Scribner's Sons), which appeared in the Yale Bicentennial series in 1902, the year before his death Another volume in the same series, written by his pu- pil, Edwin B. Wilson, was founded on his lectures. His only other printed re- mains are the papers now collected, which are few but fundamental. They are substantially limited to three, not counting an unusually small number of preliminary and supplementary out puts.
 Of the earliest, relating to diagrams and models representing the effects of temperature and pressure on all sorts of substances, Clerk Maxwell once spoke to the present reviewer in terms of warm laudation, before Gibbs had produced anything else, and when he was all but unknown in this country. His second work, on the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances, taught che mlsts how to reason about the final re- suits of reactions (without reference to the processes by which they were reached), and it stands to-day the stone at the head of the corner of dy- namical chemistry, The memoir itself Gin which, by the way, was first given the now celebrated phase rule') Occu- pies three hundred pages of the first of these two volmes; a good many more pages being substantially parts of the same whole.
 The second volume is mainly occu- pied with Gibbs peculiar calculus
 NGClOT dlldlySlSt MIliNil W Ndo QCoAe5llSh to superseGe quaternions and Grass mann's Ausdchungslchre It is now taught in sundry European universi- ties; but its vogue was prevented or hindered by a trait of it's authors character that struck everybody that ever met him, and that we know not how otherwise to designate than as diffidence Yet this is not a fit name for it. It certainly was not that diffi- dence which consists in timidity; nor can we assent to his brilliant scholar, Professor Bumstead's apparent view that he was unconscious of his own su- periority, which would come too near to making him gifted idiot, roofing up his mathematical truffles like a Per igord pig, and as oblivious of being de- prived of them. We should rather con- ceive of it as an exaggerated estimate of the possibility of any opinion of his being erroneous that might concern a difficult question not susceptible of a demonstrative solution. He thought his method ought to be left to make it's own way in the world; but he over looked the fact that he was not giving the offspring of his brain the fair start to which it was entitled. For he limi- ted himself to printing and privately circulating a fifty-page syllabus of that method, with no illustrations of it's ap- plication The industry of man of great parts and attainments would not more than have sufficed to construct any decided opinion upon such a ques- ton from such basis. If Gibbs him. self, after devoting his own surpasslng genius for some years to the matter, was not prepared to put forth cate gorical decision as to the merits of the method, pray who else could be expec- ted to undertake the office? We can only say that the ease and mastery with which his scholars have handled some of the most thorny problems of physics, as contrasted with the infer- tiltiy of the quarternionists, incline us to put our trust in "vector analysis The book is clothed in all dignity and beauty of. paper and type, carries mo- ble photograph of the master, and in every way (except by an index) recom- mends itself to the liking of friends of American science. There is good, but restrained, notice of this most genuine of high intelligences by a worthy in- terpreter, Professor H. A. Bumstead who has taken Dr. Ralph Gibbs Van Name as his collaborating editor"