Page:Scientific Papers of Josiah Willard Gibbs.djvu/13



the exception of Professor J. Willard Gibbs's last work, Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics, and of his lectures upon Vector Analysis, adapted for use as a text-book by his pupil Dr. E. B. Wilson, and printed like the former as a volume of the Yale Bicentennial Series, none of his contributions to mathematical and physical science were published in separate form, but appeared in the transactions of learned societies and in various scientific journals.

These scattered papers, which constitute the larger and perhaps the more important part of his published work, are here presented in a collected edition, from which, so far as known to the editors, no printed paper has been omitted. A small amount of hitherto unpublished matter has also been included. Permission for the present reprint of the different papers contained in these volumes has in every case been granted by the authorities in charge of the publications in which they originally appeared, a courtesy for which the editors desire here to make due acknowledgment.

In the arrangement of the papers a grouping by subject has been adopted in preference to a strict chronological order. Within the separate groups, however, the chronological order has in general been preserved.

The papers on Thermodynamics which form somewhat more than one half of the whole, constitute the first volume. Among these is the well-known memoir On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, which has proved to be of such fundamental importance to Physical Chemistry and has been translated into German by Professor Ostwald, and into French by Professor Le Chatelier.