THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY 



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 protg6 of Rumford ; 

 Faraday, 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 phe- 

 nomenon 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 lukewarm 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 the 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 subsequent discovery. 



JOULE'S PAPER OF 1843 



Meantime, in England, Joule was going on from one 

 il demonstration to another, oblivious of his 

 nan 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 Ad- 

 vancement of Science in 1843, and no one heeded it in 

 the least. It is well worth our whik-, h .\\WCT, to con- 



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