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XX. On some Questions in the Kinetic Theory of Gases. 

 Reply to Prof. Boltzmann. 



To the Editors of the Philosophical Magazine and Journal. 



Gentlemen, 



AS you Lave translated Prof. Boltzmann's voluminous 

 attack, I have to request you to publish my reply, com- 

 municated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on January 30th. 

 I have compressed it as far as I can, for 1 fear to weary your 

 readers by lengthened discussions of a somewhat personal 

 character. 



With reference to Mr. Burbury's note, I will only say for 

 the present that I pretend to no "authority," having ap- 

 proached this subject simply as a student ; and that it is with 

 the statements of Clerk-Maxwell and Clausius that I hold him 

 to be at variance. Yours trulv, 



P. G. Tait. 



Hearing, again by accident, that Professor Boltzmann has 

 in the Vienna S/tzungsberichte published a new attack on my 

 papers about the Kinetic Theory, I at once ordered a copy, 

 which has at length arrived. As my papers appeared in our 

 ' Transactions/ I think my answer to this fresh attack should 

 be communicated in the first place to this Society. The time 

 I can spare for such work at this period of the year is very 

 scant, and Prof. Boltzmann has raised a multitude of ques- 

 tions. I will take them in order. But I must commence by 

 saying, with reference to Prof. Boltzmann's peculiar remarks 

 on my behaviour as a critic, that, while leaving them to the 

 judgment of readers, I shall have to bring before the same 

 readers several instances in which Prof. Boltzmann has com- 

 pletely misstated the contents or the objects of my papers. 

 This is not a new departure. In his first attack on me he said 

 that I had nowhere stated that my investigations were con- 

 fined to hard spherical particles ; whereas I had been parti- 

 cularly explicit on that very point. But fresh cases of a 

 similar character abound in this new attack. 



First. There runs through this paper an undercurrent, at 

 least, of accusation against me for putting forward my results 

 as new, and thus ignoring the work of others. I had no such 

 intention, and I do not think anything I have said can bear 

 such a construction. My knowledge of the later history of 

 the subject is no doubt now considerably greater than it 

 was about two years ago, when, at Sir William Thomson's 





