8 THE WORK OF 8ADI CARNOT. 



writings. He then showed a familiarity with 

 those notions which have been ascribed generally 

 to Mayer and which made the latter famous, and 

 with those ideas which are now usually attributed 

 to Joule with similar result. He seems actually to 

 have planned the very kind of research which Joule 

 finally carried out. All these advanced views 

 must, of course, have been developed by Carnot 

 before 1832, the date of his illness and death, and 

 ten or fifteen years earlier than they were made 

 public by those who have since been commonly 

 considered their discoverers. These until lately 

 unpublished notes of Carnot contain equally well- 

 constructed arguments in favor of the now accepted 

 theory of heat as energy. While submitting to 

 the authority of the greatest physicists of his time, 

 and so far as to make their view the basis of his 

 work, to a certain extent, he nevertheless adhered 

 privately to the true idea. His idea of the equiva- 

 lence of heat and other forms of energy was as dis- 

 tinct and exact as was his notion of the nature of 

 that phenomenon. He states it with perfect ac- 

 curacy. 



In making his measures of heat-energy, he as- 

 sumes as a unit a measure not now common, but 

 one which may be easily and conveniently reduced 

 to the now general system of measurement. He 



