26 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



life. Since the horse turned the cannon, the strength of a horse 

 can be made to produce heat without fire, light, combustion or 

 chemical decomposition, and this heat, he characteristically sug- 

 gests, " could be used to cook victual if desired." But this method 

 of producing heat would be disadvantageous, "for more Heat 

 might be obtained by using the fodder necessary for the support 

 of a horse as fuel." The complete demonstration of this sugges- 

 tion that an animal can be considered simply as one form of heat 

 engine was only given within the last few years by Professor 

 Atwater, by his experiments with a calorimeter large enough for 

 a man to live in. 



Count Rumford possessed in a high degree the combination 

 which, unfortunately for the world, is somewhat rare, of executive 

 ability and love of science. Whatever practical work he was 

 engaged in, he at once sought to determine its philosophic princi- 

 ples, and, these discovered, to apply them to the task at hand. 

 His mind turned with marvelous rapidity from the formulation 

 of a natural law to its application to daily life, and vice versa. 

 Almost all his published papers show this peculiarity. They 

 usually begin by telling of some trivial incident or accident which 

 directed his attention to the want of information on the subject, 

 then he describes his experiments, quantitative as far as possible, 

 and gives the theory to which they led him, closing the paper 

 with a long and varied list of speculative deductions and possible 

 applications. We may take up any of his essays on heat with the 

 expectation of finding in it somewhere a reference to the needs of 

 the poor, a proof of the beneficence of the Creator and directions 

 for cooking soup, and we shall not be disappointed. His scientific 

 papers make, therefore, very lively reading, even for unscientific 

 readers, on account of their wealth of topics and allusions, their 

 clear style and their portrayal of the personal characteristics of 

 an interesting man. He would be a very dull person and extremely 

 limited in his tastes who could turn over the pages of the four 

 volumes of his work, published by the American Academy of 

 Arts and Science, without soon finding something that would at- 

 tract his attention and give him helpful ideas. 



