Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/27

Rh. Without systematic attempt at characterization, let us swiftly glance at a few scattered sections. Thus E. H. Moore, of Chicago, presided over the section for algebra and analysis in which his colleague Heinrich Maschke spoke on the same platform with the illustrious Emile Picard, of the Sorbonne—a truly remarkable trio in the purest of pure sciences, the very problems of which are unknown variables even to the educated lay mind. Leave can not be taken of mathematics until attention is called to the immortal name of Poincaré, also of the Sorbonne. preeminent equally in pure mathematics and in their applications to physical research, especially to the problems of celestial mechanics, in which connection he has been called the 'Laplace of the present century.' Poincaré read his address before the section of applied mathematics.

Readers of the will be well familiar with the name of Karl Lamprecht, of Leipzig, great historian of Germanic culture and philosopher of history, who spoke without a note before the section of medieval history. Other sections of the same department were addressed by Mahaffy, of Dublin; Pais, of Naples; Cordier, of Paris; Bury, of Cambridge; Conrad, of Halle; while under the history of languages came MacDonell, of Oxford; Sonnenschein, of Birmingham; Jespersen, of Copenhagen; Paul Mayer and Lévi, of the Collège de France; and Sievers, of Leipzig, the highest authority in phonetics. Classical art was represented by Furtwängler, of Munich; modern painting by Muther, of Breslau, and the Japanese artist Okakura Kurozi, wearing native costume and attended by his lackeys. Sections devoted to the history of oriental religion heard Oldenberg, of Kiel; Goldziher, of Budapest; Budde, of Marburg; while the history of the Christian Church was discussed by that splendid historian Adolf Harnack, of Berlin, and the scarcely less distinguished Jean Reville, of the faculty of protestant theology of Paris, both of whom represented ecclesiastical history not as a thing apart, but as merely a distinguishable aspect within the continuous stream of civilization.

The physical sections are worthy of note for their threefold division into physics of matter, physics of ether, and physics of the electron. The last was discussed by Langevin, of the Collège de France, and the brilliant Rutherford, of McGill, whose experimental researches have resulted in the accepted theory of atomic disintegration as a cause of radioactivity. In one section Sir William Ramsay, in whose laboratory helium was first derived from radium, and the eminent French chemist, Henri Moissan, who, by the way, accomplished the manufacture of artificial diamonds in the laboratory, although his title to fame rests on a much broader foundation, discussed the science of inorganic chemistry. Physical chemistry was represented by the great van't Hoff. of Berlin, who developed the concept of osmotic pressure into a consistent theory of solutions and conceived the idea of