THE CHARGE OF CHAUVINISM 225 



can easily be verified by referring to the papers mentioned, which are now 

 conveniently collected together as Articles XLVIII, XLIX, LIX, and LXIII 

 in Volume i of the Mathematical and Physical Papers. All of these 

 except the later parts of XLVIII preceded the publication of Clausius' 

 Fourth Memoir, which appeared in Poggendorf's Annalen in December 

 1854, and in which the Entropy integral is given by Clausius for the first 

 time. 



The second edition of Tail's Thermodynamics was published in 1877. 

 In it he makes more emphatic his criticism of the original form of the axiom 

 which Clausius used as the basis of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, 

 and is less eulogistic in his references to Clausius' thermodynamic work 

 in general. The facts are all given in due order ; but Clausius was not 

 satisfied with the manner in which his work was presented, and criticised 

 strongly the general " Tendency " of Tait's historical sketch of the dynamical 

 theory of heat. 



Tait has by some writers been accused of Chauvinism in his treatment 

 of scientific history. It seems to me that the charge is ill-founded. His 

 championship of Joule and Thomson as two of the real founders of Thermo- 

 dynamics and of Balfour Stewart as having established, in relation to the laws 

 of radiation, certain truths that were almost universally ascribed to Kirchhoff, 

 is probably what is in the mind of those who make the charge. But all are 

 agreed as to the eminence of Joule and Thomson, and nothing that Tait 

 wrote could ever be interpreted as detraction of Kirchhoff. Nevertheless 

 Balfour Stewart's work was not then appreciated at its true value. Even 

 Lord Rayleigh's more recent championship 1 , which is quite as strong as 

 Tait's, has not yet had its full impression on the scientific world. Probably 

 the charge of Chauvinism against Tait may be attributed in some measure to 

 the vigour of his onslaught on anything which he regarded as bad history, and 

 to the glee with which he exposed it. Except in France, Boyle's Law is the 

 name now universally given to what used to be even in this country called 

 Marriotte's Law' ; but it needed Tait to discover evidence in Newton's 

 Principia and in Marriotte's own writings that Marriotte had a skilful way of 



1 See his paper " On Balfour Stewart's Theory of the Connexion between Radiation and 

 Convection," Phil. Mag., i, January 1901, regarding which Lord Rayleigh says, "Kirchhoff's 

 independent investigation of a year and a half later [Dec. 1859] is more formal and elaborate 

 but scarcely more convincing." 



2 The name occurs even in the First Edition of "T and T," 597 I 



T. 29 



