On Grain Growth

THE brilliant and very original matter in Professor Jeffries' discussion ? should rank not only as an independent paper, but as a most important one. In particular, the explanation which it gives of the remarkable Sauveur phenomenon, over which so many of us have puzzled long and hard, is so clear, complete, and cogent as to go far toward establishing Professor Jeffries' hypothesis. The very features of Professor Sauveur's photographs which fit this hypothesis so exactly are reproduced in Chappell's photographs of steel coarsened under somewhat different conditions. 1 The ideas developed by these discoveries are so novel that conven- ience of language seems to call for new conventional terms for expressing them. In, what follows here I propose certain terms for this end, for criticism and improvement, and I attempt to generalize from Professor Jeffries' hypotheses. Generally speaking, a given set of grains which undergo no growth in the cold will, when the temperature is raised progressively, start to grow on reaching a certain temperature, and will continue growing at all higher temperatures. The "germinative" temperature is that at which growth begins, quite as the conditions which cause a seed to grow are "germinative." We have then. an inert temperature range below the germinative temperature, and a growth range above it, the germinative temperature being the limit between these two ranges. So, too, a germinant grain is one which is at its germinative temperature, and hence beginning to grow, while inert grains are those below their own germinative temperature, and the term "growing grains" includes those which are germinant and those which are above their germinative temperature. These last could be called "supergerminant" if the distinction should be needed.