Notices respecting New Boohs. 215 



physics — must now be sought in Britain and in Germany rather 

 than in France ; the newer great branches of Applied Mathematics 

 have been, till recently, almost ignored there. The Theory of Heat 

 has remained, so far as France is concerned, almost confined to the 

 region so thoroughly and so charmingly explored by Fourier ; the 

 real value of Carnot's wonderful treatise was first pointed out by 

 Thomsou. That treatise has supplied the Second Law of Thermo- 

 dynamics, and some of the grandest scientific generalizations ever 

 made. But this was not done in France. Ohm's little adaptation 

 (to electricity) of one of the merest elements of Fourier's great 

 work has been developed in Britain and in Germany into one of 

 the most extensive and most rapidly growing branches of physics 

 — profoundly valuable alike in theory and in practice — which, till 

 quite recently, was practically known only in its beggarly elements 

 to the most illustrious of French scientific men. Some detached 

 portions of Faraday's splendid discoveries were no doubt developed 

 in France, but only as isolated facts ; the grand chain of deductive 

 reasoning by which he was led to them, and by which he coordinated 

 them, was almost completely ignored. Where shall we seek for a 

 modern French work containing any thing new on Vortex-motion, 

 on Discontinuous Fluid-motion, on the Kinetic Theory of Gases, 

 or on the theories of Anomalous Dispersion or of Fluorescence ? 

 Where for a contribution to the more modern treatment of the 

 size of the grained structure of matter ? The best of recent French 

 scientific men seem to have been content to work only on some 

 of the lines of some of their more illustrious predecessors. Fizeau, 

 Foucault, and Cornu are worthy successors of Fresnel ; but Ampere 

 has had no successor in France. All countries appear to pass 

 through these peculiar phases of arrested development. Newton's 

 grand achievements effectually paralyzed, for a century at least, 

 the progress alike of pure mathematics and of the true theory of 

 light, so far as his own countrymen were concerned. Young's bril- 

 liant career made ample amends for this in the matter of the Theory 

 of Light ; but we had to take our mathematics from France and 

 Germany in the first quarter of the present century. It would 

 seem that it is next to be Germany's turn for a partial eclipse of a 

 similar kind. Gauss and Biernann have made possible the exist- 

 ence there of names as great as their own — Helmholtz and Kirch- 

 hofH, for instance ; but the men of the rising generation seem to be 

 satisfied, like the French for the last fifty years, or like the British 

 for a century after Newton, merely to swear by (and comment 

 ivpon), while infinitesimal ly extending, the words of their own pre- 

 sent Masters. It is this self-containedness, so to speak, that arrests 

 the growth of science in a nation. The human family, in its every 

 branch, needs all the help it can get from the other branches ; and 

 the real reason for France's present deficiency in the theories of 

 Heat and Electricity is its fatal neglect of every thing not written in 

 French. 



The recovery in France, first seriously set afoot by the lamented 



