rofessor Tyndall opens the question in his volume respecting the share
which different investigators have had in establishing the new theory of
forces, and his observations have given rise to a sharp controversy in
the scientific journals. The point in dispute seems to have been the
relative claims of an Englishman and a German--Dr. Joule and Dr.
Mayer--to the honor of having founded the new philosophy. Tyndall
accords a high place to the German as having worked out the view in an
_a priori_ way with remarkable precision and comprehensiveness, while he
grants to the Englishman the credit of being the first to experimentally
establish the law of the mechanical equivalent of heat. But his English
critics seem to be satisfied with nothing short of an entire monopoly of
the honor. The truth is, that, in this case, as in that of many others
furnished us in the history of science, the discovery belongs rather to
an epoch than to an individual. In the growth of scientific thought, the
time had come for the evolution of this principle, and it was seized
upon by several master-minds in different countries, who worked out
their results contemporaneously, but in ignorance of the efforts of
their fellow-laborers. But if individual claims are to be pressed, and
each man accorded his aliquot share of the credit, we apprehend that
America must be placed before either England or Germany, and for the
explicit evidence we need look no farther than the volume of Professor
Tyndall before us. The first clear connection and experimental
proof of the modern theory was made by our countryman Benjamin
Thompson,--afterwards knighted as Count Rumford by the Elector of
Bavaria. He went to Europe in the time of the American Revolution, and,
devoting himself to scientific investigations, became the founder of the
Royal Institution of Great Britain. Davy was his associate, and, so far
as the new views of heat are concerned, his disciple. He exploded the
notion of caloric, demonstrated experimentally the conversion of
mechanical force into heat, and arrived at quantitative results, which,
considering the roughness of his experiments, are remarkably near the
established facts. He revolved a brass cannon against a steel borer by
horse-power for two and one-half hours, thereby generating heat enough
to raise eighteen and three-fourths pounds of water from sixty to two
hundred and twelve degrees. Concerning the nature of heat he wrote as
follows, the Italic