Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/229

Rh physics the wrong in a multiplied form by generating an offspring especially inimical to true ideas about radiant heat, and which is represented by a yet familiar term. I mean "caloric."

This word is still used loosely as a synonym for heat, but has quite ceased to be the very definite and technical term it once was. To me it has been new to find that this so familiar word "caloric," so far as my limited search has gone, was apparently coined only toward the last quarter of the last century. It is not to be found in the earliest edition of Johnson's Dictionary, and, as far as I can learn, appears first in the corresponding French form in the works of Fourcroy. It expressed an idea which was the natural sequence of the phlogiston theory, and which is another illustration that the evil which such theories do lives after them.

"Caloric" first seemingly appears, then, as a new word coined by the French chemists, and meant originally to signify the unknown cause of the sensation heat, without any implication as to its nature. But words, we know, though but wise men's counters, are the money of fools; and this one very soon came to commit its users to an idea which was more likely to have had its origin in the mind of a chemist at that time than of any other—the idea of the cause of heat as a material ingredient of the hot body; something not, it is true, having weight, but which it would have been only a slight extension of the conception to think might one day be isolated by a higher chemical art, and exhibited in a tangible form.

We may desire to recognize the perverted truth which usually underlies error, and gives it currency, and be willing to believe that even "caloric" may have had some justification for its existence; but this error certainly seems to have been almost altogether pernicious for nearly the next eighty years, and down even to our own time. With this conception as a guide to the philosophers of the last years of the eighteenth century, it is not, at any rate, surprising if we find that at the end of a hundred years from Newton the crowd seems to be still going constantly further and further away from its true goal.

Although Provost gave us his most material contribution about 1790, we have, it seems to me, on the whole, little to interest us during that barren time in the history of radiant energy called the eighteenth century—a century whose latter years are given up, till near its very close, to bad a priori theories in our subject, except in the work of two Americans; for in the general dearth, at this time, of experiments in radiant heat, it is a pleasure to fancy Benjamin Franklin sitting down before the fire, with a white stocking on one leg and a black one on the other, to see which leg would burn first, and to recall again how Benjamin