PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY 6f WASHINGTON. 27 



8th Meeting. June 10, 1811. 



The President in the Chair. 

 Mr. W. B. Taylor presented a memoir 



ON THE nature AND ORIGIN OP FORCE. 



( Thifs communicntion is published in full under the title, " Thoughts on the 



Nature (ind Origin of Force," in the Annual Report of the Board of 



Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, for 1870, pp. 241-257.) 



(ABSTRACT.) 



The " Conservation of Force" is not an axiom, as it seems natu- 

 ral to regard it, but a corollary — dependent on the coexistence in 

 all matter of two opposing tendencies, attraction and repulsion. 

 Were any form of matter absolutely incompressible (and hence 

 inelastic), there would be in every case of the collision of such 

 matter, a simple destruction of vis viva. 



Motion is not the only exhibition of force — as we have a large 

 array of static forces — nor the measure of force, since it is not 

 proportional thereto, but follows the law of the square root of the 

 power originating it. Contrary, therefore, to a not unusual gen- 

 eralization, motion is not persistent, but may be destroyed, re- 

 sulting in static force, and it may be created or produced from 

 static force. The phenomena of so-called "latent heat" may be 

 cited as an example. 



If we accept the nebular hypothesis of the cosmogony, all force 

 was originally static ; and observation shows us that it is on the 

 whole ever becoming more and more kinetic, ever more and more 

 equably diffused ; ihe tendency being steadily to what Professor 

 Sir William Thomson has designated the " Dissipation of Energy.'' 

 The sum of the static or potential, and of the kinetic forms of 

 energy, is of course forever constant, or unalterable. 



The so-called "vital forces" have been shown in I'ecent times 

 to be but a portion of the preexisting store of purely mechanical 

 energy. Not only organic nutrition, growth, and movement, but 

 the more subtle processes of thought and emotion are maintained 

 from without, and are dependent on material changes and the 

 transference of molecular motion. All animal power (like all 

 mechanical power employed by man) is derived ultimately from 

 the vegetable storehouse of chemical energy ; and the store of 

 static vegetable force is derived from the actinism of the solar 

 rays. 



These successive transfers of force through molecular changes 

 and movements are therefore but expressions of dynamic evolu- 

 tion resulting from the collisions of gravitative or attractive forces 

 with repulsive forces, in the matter of the celestial bodies. From 

 which it results that the origin of all dynamic displays (no less 



