Feb. 24, 1887] 



NA TURE 



387 



elsewhere from the Clothworkers' Company and others of 

 the City Guilds. As far as help from Parliament is con- 

 cerned, England as usual has to find its share of the 

 money and reaps none of the advantage. It is surely not 

 too much to hope that, if Sooo/. a year is allotted from 

 the public funds to Colleges which supply the wants of 

 Aberystwith and Bangor, it will not be considered 

 impolitic to help from the National Exchequer the mag- 

 nificent and national work which has been and is being 

 done in the North of England. 



But to return to the book before us. It is fortunate 

 that while the memory of the men who initiated the 

 undertaking is still fresh, and while most of those who 

 carried it out are still with us, an historian such as 

 Mr. Thompson has been found for the Owens College. 

 He has given, not merely the public story of the institu- 

 tion, but short histories of many of those who were closely 

 connected with it and who have now passed away. He 

 has evidently had access to authentic documents and 

 other sources of accurate information, and he has pro- 

 duced a work which will be read with interest by many 

 who have in the past known but little of the Owens 

 College and its founders. 



ANDERSON ON HEAT AND WORK 

 On tlic Conversion of Heat into Work. By W. Anderson, 

 M.Inst.C.E. (London : Whittaker and Co., and George 

 Bell and Sons, 1S87.) 



VERY few modern books on Engineering contain what 

 can truly be called accurate science ; one of whose 

 special characteristics is the use of each term in one 

 definite sense only. In other words, take at random a 

 work on any branch of Engineering, and you find, in 

 every page, more than one sentence which, if it be read 

 as a scientific statement, is simply inaccurate. Of the 

 exceptional works the majority consist of those written 

 by the late Prof. Rankine. He seems to have left no 

 successor, so far as this department of applied science is 

 concerned ; and the book before us strongly supports the 

 notion. It gives, in a succinct but comprehensive form, 

 an introduction to the modern Dynamical Theory of 

 Heat, treated almost entirely from the practical En- 

 gineer's point of view. It is obviously written by a man 

 who knows his subject, and it is therefore presumably 

 written in terms intelligible to those for whom it is 

 designed. It thus aftbrds a good opportunity of making 

 some further remarks upon the strange line of separation 

 which has unfortunately been drawn between the vocabu- 

 laries (or, rather, the dictionaries) of Pure and of Applied 

 Science. In using this opportunity, for the purpose 

 stated, we do not attack the present work in particular ; 

 we attack the mass of works on Engineering, of which it 

 is a high-class specimen. 



From the purely scientific point of view there are two 

 prominent faults in the majority of such works as that 

 before us. The first is the habitual use of a special 

 " vernacular " ; not so outrageous, perhaps, as " pidgin " 

 English, but quite on a par with a "wire," a "cable,'' an 

 " aniline," and such-like monstrosities of recent American 

 origin. Were the words of this vernacular different from 

 those of strict science, our only complaint against their 

 use would be that we should have to learn what would 



be practically a new language before we could read an 

 Engineering book. But they are, in the main, the same 

 words ; and yet each stands for other than the usually 

 accepted meaning. Thus we constantly find pressure 

 given as so many tons per square inch (sometimes the 

 word " square" is omitted). Now, tons per square inch, 

 or pounds per square foot, refer to matter and not to 

 force. They measure, in fact, what is called surface- 

 density. This is altogether " most tolerable, and not to 

 be endured." 



The second fault is more grave. It consists in the 

 fundamental misuse of well-settled scientific terms, which 

 the author of an Engineering book usually perpetrates 

 whenever (for a moment) he deserts his vernacular and 

 passes from the applied to the pure part of his subject. 

 We remark in passing that, in the very first page, our 

 author speaks of Mayer's EXPERIMENTAL demonstration 

 of the equivalence of heat and work ! This shows how 

 deep a root has been taken by the extravagant laudations 

 of Mayer, which were so common twenty years ago, but 

 which have long since been thoroughly exploded. 



Now, to faults of the first class mentioned above. We 

 quote only a few of the more racy passages we had 

 marked ; and here, as in the subsequent examples, we 

 introduce (to save comment) Italics where they seem 

 desirable. 



" Accelerating forces, tliat is forces acting steadily for 

 a time." This may be the Engineer's vernacular, but it 

 has no necessary connection with the use, in English, of 

 the term " accelerating force." 



" Dividing {j„<)\2,\oo foot-ponnds per minute) by 33,000 

 foot-pounds, we get ii9'4 horse-power ! " Put this in the 

 form "dividing 500/. a year by 50/. we get 10/. a year,'" 

 which contains essentially the same absurdity, and we 

 can scarcely fancy that our author would have let it stand : 

 although in its above form it is put as Engineers too 

 commonly put it. 



" The heavenly bodies, moving at imiforni velocities 

 for ever are instances of potential energy." This is the 

 Engineer's way of saying that since there is no change of 

 kinetic, there can be no change of potential, energy. 



" When we speak of perfectly elastic substances, we 

 do not mean those which, like india-rubber, have a great 

 range of elasticity." But, though this is true of Engineers, 

 it is not true of purely scientific men. Think of air, for 

 instance. 



" Endowed with energy competent to produce the 

 sensation of 100"^ Fahr. of heat." Here the Engineers 

 pick a tiuarrel with the Physiologist as well as with the 

 Physicist. 



As explained above, all this is merely the licence which 

 practical men take with scientific terms. As the book is 

 written for such men, perhaps we ought not to complain. 

 But the faults of the second class, some of which we 

 proceed to give, can only be explained by the practical 

 men's using scientific words in a wrong sense. From the 

 following, and others too numerous to be quoted, a new 

 science (!) could be founded, having nothing in common 

 with that which Galilei and Newton have handed down 

 to us, (of course on the supposition that all the words 

 emplQved are to be taken as they are understood in pure 

 science.) 



" Hence X.\\t potential energy of each gallon of water is 



