112 COMPRESSIBILITY OF GASES. 



elapsed since the memorable experience of Galileo and 

 the pump-maker, which revealed the fact that this emo- 

 tion of nature did not extend to a vacuum over water 

 at a height of more than thirty-three feet. Only eigh- 

 teen years had passed since Torricelli's capital experi- 

 ment which substituted thirty inches of mercury for 

 thirty-three feet of water, showing that this abhorrence 

 on the part of nature seemed to be of the work to be 

 done rather than of the vacuum which would attend 

 its performance. And finally it was but fourteen 

 years backward from Boyle to Pascal, who, by his 

 famous experiment in which he caused the Torricellian 

 tube to be carried to the top of the Puy de Dome, dem- 

 onstrated the existence of atmospheric pressure and 

 banished the so called nature's abhorrence of a vacuum 

 from the realms of science. The discovery of Boyle's 

 law which so soon followed was an achievement scarcely 

 less important. Galileo, Torricelli, Pascal and Boyle 

 together laid the foundations of science in the depart- 

 ment of gases during the second third of the seventeenth 

 century. 



MARRIOTTE ' — 1676. 



Several years afterward and without knowledge of 

 Boyle's experiments, but by an identical method and 

 with similar apparatus the Abbe Marriotte in France ar- 

 rived at the same principle, which is accordingly known 

 by the French to-day as the law of Marriotte. 



sulzer 2 — 1753. 



The experiments of Boyle and Marriotte were reported 

 by several observers in both England and France, without, 

 however, resulting in any marked' addition of either fact 



1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed., Pneumatics, vol. xvi. 



Essai sur le nature de l'Air, 1679. (Euvres de Marriotte, 1740, torn. 1. 

 9 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th ed., Pnuematics, vol. xvi. 



Mem. de l'Academie de Berlin, 1753. 



64: 



