OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 515 



names have been honored ones with me from my earliest years, and 

 throu-^h you, to whom I have looked as a master in physical science 

 since my boyhood. The thanks I would express through you to the 

 Academy which has thus greatly honored me are very deeply felt. 



As to the work I have done in connection with the subject of heat, I 

 am glad to believe, on your assurance, that it is such as the great fore- 

 caster of our modern physical doctrine of the subject would have ap- 

 proved ; and it will, now and always, be a lasting gratification to me 

 that it has been thus fortunate in being connected with the name 

 of Count Rumford. 



You have spoken of the labors that I have carried on ; but when I 

 remember that a later discoverer than Rumford tells us how, even as 

 a little child, he was so impressed with the wonder and mystery of 

 radiant heat, that he then dedicated his life to its study, I am glad to 

 remember too, that, if I cannot resemble Melloni in the great results he 

 achieved, I am at least happy in this, that the principal labors of my 

 maturer life have been upon the plan which pleased my childish 

 thought, so that these researches to which you allude have been to 

 me a delight rather than a task. 



The work then of which you speak has never seemed hard, or a thing 

 to seek relief from, but always rather like a solace ; and it is still some- 

 thing which I trust to follow through the rest of life, without needing 

 any reward other than it brings in itself ; though when there comes 

 such approbation as yours, I can rejoice in it yet more. 



Your kindness and the occasion will, I hope, gain indulgence for 

 what is personal in that I have just said, and which is all I have to 

 say, except that I would ask to be allowed to mention that the bolome- 

 ter, to which you have specially alluded, was devised to meet an actual 

 necessity. The most successful use of the thermopile demands at least 

 as many years of apprenticeship as are given by the successful per- 

 former on a musical instrument ; for the full results to be obtained 

 from any such apparatus, which deal chiefly with invisible radiation, 

 are only to be reached after such long and patient practice as few care 

 to give. 



I may say that I had already given more time to becoming familiar 

 with what the thermopile could do, than it would have taken me to 

 acquire another language, before I found myself unable to prosecute 

 the research on the distribution of heat in the normal spectrum with 

 it, so that I was perhaps then entitled to conclude that I had reached 

 the limit of its sensitiveness. I gave, accordingly, nearly the whole 



