604 Life of Count Rumford. 



As one of the eight Foreign Associates of the Institute 

 of France, elected in 1803, we can trace some of his 

 labors and investigations and the results of them while 

 he resided in Paris, in the journals of that body, and 

 in the republication or sketches of some of his papers 

 in the Biblioth^que Britannique. Either a translation 

 or the original English of some of these papers was 

 transmitted to be read before the Royal Society. On 

 March 9, 1807, he read before the Institute a paper on 

 The Adhesion of Molecules in Liquids. He says he 

 had begun to experiment on oxygen in 1786. He 

 had read a paper to his class, June 16, 1806, founded 

 upon a memoir on it which he had composed in 1800, 

 which he had shown the next year to Pictet on his 

 visit to England, and which he had brought before 

 the savans in Paris in 1802. In Vol. XXXV. of the 

 Bibliotheque Britannique is a description of a new 

 boiler for economizing heat and fuel, which Rum- 

 ford had read 'before the Institute, October 6, 1806, 

 and which was published in Nicholson's Journal in 

 June, 1807. 



The Count devoted much time to experimenting 

 upon the draught of carts and carriages with broad or 

 narrow rims to their wheels. It had been supposed that 

 broad wheels, by presenting a greater surface for friction, 

 required a greater draught. But in the vast amount of 

 heavy transportation over the roads of France during 

 the war, it was found that those roads were so cut up, 

 and in such constant need of costly repair, that a great 

 saving was effected by making the rims of wheels 

 broader. Rumford experimented with a view to prove 

 that the change also very much lessened the draught. He 

 read a paper before the first class of the Institute, April 



