reek word for movement) was, according to Ampere,
the science "in which movements are considered in themselves
[independent of the forces which produce them], as we observe them in
solid bodies all about us, and especially in the assemblages called
machines."[57] Kinematics, as the study soon came to be known in
English,[58] was one of the two branches of elementary mechanics, the
other being statics.

[Footnote 57: _Ibid._, vol. 1, pp. 51-52.]

[Footnote 58: Willis (_op. cit._ footnote 21) adopted the word
"kinematics," and this Anglicization subsequently became the standard
term for this branch of mechanics.]

In his definition of kinematics, Ampere stated what the faculty of
mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris, had been groping
toward since the school's opening some 40 years earlier. The study of
mechanisms as an intellectual discipline most certainly had its origin
on the left bank of the Seine, in this school spawned, as suggested by
one French historian,[59] by the great _Encyclopedie_ of Diderot and
d'Alembert.

[Footnote 59: G. Pinet, _Histoire de l'Ecole Polytechnique_, Paris,
1887, pp. viii-ix. In their forthcoming book on kinematic synthesis, R.
S. Hartenberg and J. Denavit will trace the germinal ideas of Jacob
Leupold and Leonhard Euler of the 18th century.]

Because the Ecole Polytechnique had such a far-reaching influence upon
the point of view from which mechanisms were contemplated by scholars
for nearly a century after the time of Watt, and by compilers of
dictionaries of mechanical movements for an even longer time, it is
well to look for a moment at the early work that was done there. If one
is interested in origins, it might be profitable for him to investigate
the military school in the ancient town of Mezieres, about 150 miles
northeast of Paris. It was here that Lazare Carnot, one of the principal
founders of the Ecole Polytechnique, in 1783 published his essay on
machines,[60] which was concerned, among other things, with showing the
impossibility of "perpetual motion"; and it was from Mezieres that
Gaspard Monge and Jean Hachette[61] came to Paris to work out the system
of mechanism classification that has come to be associated with the
names of Lanz and Betancourt.

[Footnote 60: Lazare N. M. Carnot, _Essai sur les machines en general_,
Mezieres, 1783 (later published as _Principes fondamentaux de
l'equilibre et du mouvement_, Paris, 1803).]

[Footnote 61: Biographical no