MAYER 281 



been used for examination purposes, but simply as sources 

 of facts. But a mental constitution of this kind is also the 

 chief cause of the absence of all recognition, and hence of the 

 unhappy fate of those who possess it. He who is not like the 

 great majority of people, and hence does not appear adapted 

 to the traditional form of life in the way in which he expresses 

 himself, will not easily be understood, but will be readily 

 passed over or even regarded with suspicion. 



Mayer's first paper in Liebig's Annalen (1842) certainly 

 received sufficient circulation; but it can hardly be doubted 

 that the great majority of readers, and particularly of those 

 who were not closely connected with research, could not 

 have recognised the importance of its contents, if only on 

 account of its shortness as compared with its richness 

 in ideas. But it can just as little be doubted that all those 

 whose minds were already busy with the question, which had 

 been before science for forty years, must have been placed, 

 immediately on reading the paper, or at any rate after short 

 consideration, in possession of practically complete insight 

 into the essentials of the new line of thought. It depended 

 upon the few who proceeded to work on the subject and to 

 spread the ideas whether Mayer would at once be recognised 

 as the originator; and after the appearance of the second 

 publication (1845), which was fully detailed, it was self- 

 evident that no one had produced anything of equal value 

 prior to Mayer. These few people failed in their duty.^ We 



1 Helmholtz as Referee of the Physical Society in Berlin would have 

 been best situated to report in the Fortschritten der Physik details of 

 Robert Mayer's earlier writings as well as his own publication of 1847. 

 But he only refers to Mayer so shortly, that one would suppose him to 

 have published nothing of importance. Only later (1852 and subse- 

 quently), did Helmholtz gradually admit in public a few facts which had 

 then already begun to be known to wider circles. (See in this con- 

 nection Weyrauch's Die Mechanik der Wdrme, Stuttgart, 1893, pp. 

 226-228 and 316; also the same author's Robert Mayer, Stuttgart, 19x5, 

 p. 67 ff., and Ostwald's Grosse Manner, Leipzig, 1909, pp. 272-274.) 



Joule's first publication on the subject dates from 1843. William 

 Thomson (Lord Kelvin) also put him forward as the originator of the 

 idea of the equivalence between heat and work, in opposition to Robert 



