ARTICLES IN NORTH BRITISH REVIEW 209 



Of the many facts in the history of energy three only became matter 

 of serious controversy, namely, the true place to be assigned to Mayer 

 as one of the founders of the theory of heat, the sufficiency of Clausius' 

 axiom as a basis for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the claim 

 of Clausius to the Entropy integral. 



The occasion which led to Tait's incursion into historic fields was a 

 lecture on "Force" delivered by Tyndall in 1862 in the Royal Institution. 

 The subject was what we now call " Transformations of Energy," and in 

 several particulars corresponded curiously with Tait's own inaugural lecture 

 of 1860. In developing the subject Tyndall, however, proclaimed that 

 "the striking generalisations " laid before his audience were "taken from 

 the labours of a German physician named Mayer." This no doubt was 

 true ; but the manner in which the work of Mayer was lauded seemed to 

 imply that the examples given of energy transformations were peculiarly 

 Mayer's and had been imagined by no other natural philosopher, and that 

 Mayer's priority claims had been hitherto altogether overlooked. This implica- 

 tion was certainly not true, and controversy was naturally roused. Joule, who 

 was himself one of the first to bring Mayer's work to the notice of scientific 

 men, sent a dignified protest to the Philosophical Magazine and, as a 

 corrective to what they regarded as erroneous history, Thomson and Tait 

 communicated an article on Energy to Good Words for October 1862. 

 This article is historically important as the occasion on which the term 

 Kinetic Energy saw the light. Tyndall replied in the February and 

 June numbers of the Philosophical Magazine for 1863, and Tait's rejoinders 

 appeared in April and August. 



Following up this controversy there appeared two unsigned articles 

 in the North British Review for 1864 one in February on the Dynamical 

 Theory of Heat, the other in May on Energy. In the preface to his 

 Thermodynamics (1867) Tait refers to these reviews as from his pen 

 indeed they constitute with necessary changes a large part of the book. 

 The earlier article traces the modern theory of heat from the independent 

 experiments of Rumford and Davy in 1798 through the remarkable reasoning 

 of Carnot (1824) and the epoch-making experiments of Joule (1840-48) 

 to the final establishment of thermodynamics at the hands of Clausius, 

 Rankine, and Thomson ; and then, being avowedly a review of Verdet's 

 Expost de la Thdorie Mtcanique de la Chaleur (1863) and Tyndall's Heat 

 considered as a Mode of Motion (1863), closes with appreciations and criticisms 



T. 27 



