Abstract
MY DEAR LORD RAYLEIGH,—From the heading of your first letter, and from the wide scope of the passage you quoted from my paper, I imagined that yot intended to raise the whole question of Van der Waals's treatment of Laplace's pressure. Otherwise I should not, in my answer, have referred to his b or to the unfortunate results of comparing his formula with experiment. I should, in fact, have contented myself with the acknowledgment that you had given an accurate account of the contents of a portion of Van der Waals's earlier chapters, which I had carelessly missed on the first hasty perusal; and that these contents justified the expression 3Kv/2 as the virial of Laplace's pressure. But to this I should certainly have added that, even had I been fully cognizant of that portion of the pamphlet when I wrote my paper, I should probably not have modified (at least to any serious extent) the passage you quoted.
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TAIT, P. On Van der Waals's Treatment of Laplace's Pressure in the Virial Equation: in Answer to Lord Rayleigh. Nature 44, 627–628 (1891). https://doi.org/10.1038/044627b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/044627b0