224 PETER GUTHRIE TAIT 



" In that same article occurs the expression 1 



which (considering that there is absolutely no limitation of the body to which the /// may 

 be applied) supplies with tolerable completeness the / of the bone over which Clausius 

 snarls, and triumphantly justifies T"s [Tait's] 178. 



"Lastly remark that the very formula for the 'part of it (the heat) rejected as 

 waste into the refrigerator at the temperature T' in the other article' referred to by 

 T ( 179) is 



_ 



dxdydecdt . e 7j T 



The dxdydzcdt here is T"s dq and e J] T is i/t when the thermodynamic thermo- 



metry is used. 



" Last lastly remark that while T was keeping the notation p he was working along 

 with Joule (Phil. Mag. 1852, second half-year) to find whether #=///. a agreed approxi- 

 mately enough with air thermometer ordinary reckoning to be a convenient assumption, 

 and (Phil. Mag. 1853 first half-year) intimated that it was so (and set forth the same 

 more fully afterwards with Joule, Trans. R. S.): and from 1851 (Dynamical Theory of H., 

 Part I forward) T had the formula 



and kept putting forward in all his papers till he finally adopted [? JjT], leaving 

 absolutely no room for Clausius' pretensions. Cl. in fact never showed any right 

 whatever to 



and till this day has not put it on its right foundation. 



(Signed) T." 



The argument in this letter is practically identical with what Thomson 

 himself allowed Tait to publish in the Philosophical Magazine for May 1879 

 as a note to Tait's own communication " On the Dissipation of Energy " ; but 

 the tone of it is more personal. The statements in the last paragraph 



1 [Marginal note by Thomson himself.] The misprints corrected in Phil. Mag., Jan. 

 1853, bemuddle the formula for final uniform temperature but not the meaning of the 



dissipation and the formula / / ~ for it. 



1 "On the Restoration of Mechanical Energy from an unequally heated Space," Phil. 

 Slag, v, 1853, Math, and Phys. Papers, VoL I, No. LXIII, p. 555. 



