﻿406 Dr. Guyot on the Forms and Forces of Matter. 



Some of these conclusions are contained in five letters which 

 Sir W. Thomson has done me the honour of addressing to me, 

 and which I give with permission on pp. 423-429, in the be- 

 lief that they are of too great interest and importance to remain 

 unpublished. The first of these letters formed the substance of a 

 communication to the Royal Society of London, and appears in 

 the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 1871, No. 125, p. 271. 

 I need not point out that great additional interest has been 

 given to the subject by Professor Challis's interesting paper in 

 the April Number of your Magazine. 

 I remain, Gentlemen, 



Your obedient Servant, 



Frederick Guthrie. 



I. Synthetical View of the Forms and Forces of Matter. 

 By Dr. Guyot*. 



All who occupy themselves with general physics have doubt- 

 less read Mr. Grove's ' Correlation of the Physical Forces/ either 

 in the original or in the French translation of M. l'Abbe Moigno, 

 published in Paris in 1856 with notes by M. Seguin, sen. Mr. 

 Grove published the first edition of his work in 1848, and he 

 himself dates its commencement from 1842. 



M. Seguin, sen., while admiring Mr. Grove's synthetical 

 train of thought, claims, so to say, the priority thereof for his 

 uncle, the celebrated Mongolfier, or rather for himself as his 

 uncle's intellectual legatee. Nevertheless he declares that it 

 was only in 1848, after Mr. Grove's publication, that he thought 

 of disinterring from its crypt the scientific treasure of which he 

 was heir. Soon afterwards (in 1852) he founded the Cosmos 

 under the editorship of the learned Abbe Moigno, and pub- 

 lished a great number of articles, which, together with the notes 

 added by him to the translation of Mr. Grove's work, complete a 

 synthetical theory which has only, as a real and certain date, the 

 date of its publication. 



M. Love, a most distinguished engineer and, I imagine, one 

 of our colleagues, has just published this year an extremely in- 

 teresting work in the same direction, or which is at least in- 

 spired by the same synthetical idea of the correlation of the 

 physical forces. This work is entitled Essai sur P Identity des 

 agents qui produisent le Son, la Chaleur, la Lumiere, et VElec- 

 tricite (Paris, 1861). Mr. Grove still remains at present the 

 founder of the school, the first popularizer of the idea. 



He would indeed remain so did not the dead arise from their 



* "Coup d'ceil synthetique sur les formes et les forces de la matiere. Note 

 sommaire presentee au Cercle de la Presse Scientifique daus la Seance du 

 4 Juillet 1861 " (Presse Scientifique, 1861, t. iii. p. 130). 



