1857.] on the Conseruation of Force, 361 



servation of force ; and one of the highest uses of the principle is 

 to suggest such inquiries. Explications of similar points are con- 

 tinually produced, and will be most abundant from the hands of 

 those who, not desiring to ease their labour by forgetting the prin- 

 ciple, are ready to admit it either tiicitly, or better still, effectively, 

 being then continually guided by it. Such philosophers believe 

 that heat must do its equivalent of work : that if in doing work it 

 seem to disappear, it is still producing its equivalent effect, though 

 often in a manner partially or totally unknown ; and that if it give 

 rise to another form of force (as we imperfectly express it), that 

 force is equivalent in power to the heat which has disappeared. 



What is called chemical attraction, affords equally instructive 

 and suggestive considerations in relation to the principle of the 

 conservation of force. The indestructibility of individual matter, 

 is one case, and a most important one, of the conservation of che- 

 mical force. A molecule has been endowed with powers which 

 give rise in it to various qualities, and these never change, either 

 in their nature or amount. A particle of oxygen is ever a particle 

 of oxygen — nothing can in the least wear it. If it enters into com- 

 bination and disappears as oxygen, — if it pass through a thousand 

 combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral, — if it lie hid for a thou- 

 sand years and then be evolved, it is oxygen with its first qualities, 

 neither more nor less. It has all its original force, and only that ; 

 the amount of force which it disengaged when hiding itself, has 

 again to be employed in a reverse direction when it is set at liberty ; 

 and if, hereafter, we should decompose oxygen, and find it com- 

 pounded of other particles, we should only increase the strength of 

 the proof of the conservation of force, for we should have a right 

 to say of these particles, long as they have been hidden, all that we 

 could say of the oxygen itself. 



Again, the body of facts included in the theory of definite pro- 

 portions, witnesses to the truth of the conservation of force ; and 

 though we know little of the cause of the change of properties of 

 the acting and produced bodies, or how the forces of the former 

 are hid amongst those of the latter, we do not for an instant doubt 

 the conservation, but are moved to look for the manner in which the 

 forces are, for the time, disposed, or if they have taken up another 

 form of force, to search what that form may be. 



Even chemical action at a distance, which is in such antithetical 

 contrast with the ordinary exertion of chemical afl[inity, since it can 

 produce effects miles away from the particles on which they depend, 

 and which are effectual only by forces acting at insensible distances, 

 still proves the same thing, the conservation of force. Preparations 

 can be made for a chemical action in the simple voltaic circuit, but 

 until the circuit be complete that action does not occur ; yet in 

 completing we can so arrange the circuit, that a distant chemical 

 action, the perfect equivalent of the dominant chemical action, shall 

 be produced; and this result, whilst it establishes the electro- 



