Thermodynamics and Chemistry - A Non-Mathematical Treatise for Chemists and Students of Chemistry #251534

I am glad, in the first place, to have my treatise rendered easily accessible to American students; one of the objects which I had in mind when writing it was to make the work of J. Willard Gibbs known and admired; I like to think it will contribute to enhance, within your active universities, the glory of your illustrious countryman. Furthermore, this glory is more and more resplendent every day; more and more clearly the author of the phase law appears as the initiator of a chemical revolution; and many do not hesitate to compare the Yale College professor to our Lavoisier. Chemists had fixed upon a certain number of properties by which they recognized a substance to be a definite compound; these characteristics are effaced by the phase rule; many substances, to which formulae had been attributed, are erased from the number of combinations; chemical science as a whole needs a revision at which the laboratories of America and Europe are working most diligently.