﻿Dr. Guyot on the Forms and Forces of Matter. 407 



tombs. Unfortunately I am compelled to resuscitate them. 

 The school is broken up and the disciples are scattered when 

 M. Love admits an electric fluid, when M. Seguin reestablishes 

 a luminous fluid, and I raise before the readers of the Presse 

 Scientifique the obituary stone in honour of my ' Elements of 

 General Physics/ published in 1832, ten years before Mr. Grove, 

 twenty years before M. Seguin, thirty years before M. Love. 



God forbid that I should seek in any way to detract from Mr. 

 Grove's work, from M. Seguin' s publications, or from M. Love's 

 book. I recognize their great value, and I leave that intact. 

 They have maintained the analogy and the identity of the phy- 

 sical forces by fact, arguments, and calculations which have 

 strengthened the idea and familiarized it to a great many 

 minds. But they have not entirely deprived it of obscurity, 

 and have not yet given it that character of simplicity and uni- 

 versality demanded by a simple and prolific law of general 

 physics. 



It is not my purpose, moreover, to discuss a sterile question 

 of priority; but I think I may be useful to science in proposing 

 myself as a workman in the workshop of scientific progress. 

 Respecting the work of others, ought I not to make known my 

 own, aud state since when and by what title I have been ap- 

 prenticed ? 



Only in this sense I offer to the readers of the Presse Scien- 

 tifique my c Elements of General Physics/ and refer their date 

 to 1832. At this epoch I had established and proved: — (1) that 

 there exist two kinds of matter, identical in principle, essenti- 

 ally different in form ; (2) that there exist two kinds of move- 

 ments, identical in principle, essentially different in their mani- 

 festations — the movement of translation or bodily (" du corps"), 

 and the movement of vibration or molecular; (3) that move- 

 ment is essential to matter and proportional to mass ; (4) that 

 the movement of translation and the movement of vibration 

 are reciprocally complementary and change into one another ; 



(5) that attraction (? gravitation, F. G.), magnetism, and elec- 

 tricity are the most general consequences of molecular motion ; 



(6) that the second degree of molecular motion constitutes 

 heat ; (7) that the third degree of molecular motion constitutes 

 light ; (8) that taste and smell are relative manifestations of 

 molecular motion; (9) that sound is a mixed motion, com- 

 pounded of the motion of translation or " bodily/' and the 

 motion of vibration or molecular; (10) finally, that ail the pro- 

 perties, either physical or physiological manifestations, of bodies 

 are derivatives of the translatory or vibratory motion. 



What I advanced at the above date I am now prepared to es- 

 tablish and demonstrate with greater clearness and confidence. 



2E2 



