90 General Reflections on Heai. 
LIT. It is an idea which has often struck me most forcibly, 
and I have often wondered at not seeing it more noticed in 
authors,* that heat is the ultimate source of all the grand ex- 
hibitions of Power in the natural world. ‘This is the imme- 
diate agent in producing elastici/y; and nearly all the exhi- 
bitions of power in nature arise, either directly or indirectly, 
from elastic eriform matter suddenly expanding itself. Hence 
the winds that roar through the sky and convulse the ocean; 
hence the earthquake and volcano, that shake and rend the 
solid globe; hence the desolating whirlwind that bears the 
tempest on its wings. 
But it is not in these sublime and astonishing scenes of 
nature alone, that we become acquainted with the energies of 
this omnipotent agent. Is not every thing great in art, that 
depends on motion, also the offspring of its power? Among 
all the ministers of art, none is to be compared in energy 
with the elastic powerof steam. M. Dupin, a distinguish- 
ed member of the French Justitute, has recently afforded 
the following forcible illustration of the potency of this agent. 
The great pyramid of Evypt required for its erection, the 
labour of 100.000 men for twenty years. Its weight is esti- 
mated at 10,400,000 tons. By a fair calculation, the steam 
engines now at work in England, would constitute a force ad- 
equate to the accomplishment of the same object in eighteen 
hours. ‘To have raised the pyramid in eighteen hours, at 
the rate at which the Egyptians proceeded, would have re- 
quired 974,000,000 of men; to man the engines in England 
are required not more thun 36,000 hands. By the aid of 
ihe steam engine, therefore, one man can now accomplish 
as much labour as could have been performed by 27,056 
Kegyptians, aided by such machinery as they could command.F 
Until a very recent period, Lord Bacon seems to have been 
the only philosopher, who had formed any adequate eoncep- 
tions of the dominion which man would ultimately acquire 
over matter, by studying the laws by which it is controlled. 
His Novum Organum is full of anticipations, of which the pre- 
*The idea, however, did not escape Black and Fourcroy, both cf 
whom made forcible mention of it. 
+ Not having access to the work of Dupin, the writer is dependent 
for the data on which the foregoing statements are founded on extracts 
im the public Journals. 
