THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PHYSICS 



same lines. And the outside world was equally heedless 

 of the work of the Heilbronn physician. There was no 

 friend to inspire enthusiasm and give courage, no kindred 

 spirit to react on this masterful but lonely mind. And 

 this is the more remarkable because there are few other 

 cases where a master -originator in science has come 

 upon the scene except as the pupil or friend of some 

 other master-originator. Of the men we have noticed 

 in the present connection, Young was the friend and 

 confrere of Davy ; Davy, the protege of Rumford ; Far- 

 raday, the pupil of Davy ; Fresnel, the co-worker with 

 Arago ; Colding, the confrere of Oersted ; Joule, the 

 pupil of Dalton. But Mayer is an isolated phenomenon 

 one of the lone mountain-peak intellects of the century. 

 That estimate may be exaggerated which has called him 

 the Galileo of the nineteenth century, but surely no luke- 

 warm praise can do him justice. 



Yet for a long time his work attracted no attention 

 whatever. In 1847, when another German physician, 

 Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the most massive and 

 towering intellects of any age, had been independently 

 led to comprehension of the doctrine of conservation of 

 energy, and published his treatise on the subject, he had 

 hardly heard of his countryman Mayer. When he did 

 hear of him, however, he hastened to renounce all claim 

 to the doctrine of conservation, though the world at 

 large gives him credit of independent even though sub- 

 sequent discovery. 



Meantime in England Joule was going on from one 

 experimental demonstration to another, oblivious of his 

 German competitors and almost as little noticed by his 

 own countrymen. He read his first paper before the 

 chemical section of the British Association for the 



217 



