Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/404

390 heat which. accompanied its beams, and brought something more necessary to our life and that of all nature than the light itself.

The idea that not only mankind, but nature, would perish though the light continued, if this was divorced from heat, made a profound impression, he tells us, on his childish mind. The statement that such an idea could enter with dominating force into the mind of a child will perhaps seem improbable to most. It will, however, be comprehensible enough to some here, I have no doubt.

Is there some ornithologist present who remembers a quite infantile attraction which birds possessed for him above all the rest of the animated creation; some chemist whose earliest recollections are of the strange and quite abnormal interest he found as a child in making experimental mixtures of every kind of accessible household fluid and solid; some astronomer who remembers when a very little creature that not only the sight of the stars, but of any work on astronomy, even if utterly beyond his childish comprehension, had an incomprehensible attraction for him? I will not add to the list. There are, at any rate, many here who will understand and believe Melloni when he tells how this radiant heat, commonplace to others, was wonderful to his childish thought, and wrought a charm on it such that he could not see wood burn in a fireplace, or look at a hot stove, without its drawing his mind, not to the fire or iron itself, but to the mysterious effluence which it sent.

This was the youth of genius; but let not any fancy that genius in research is to be argued from such premonitions alone, unless it can add to them that other qualification of genius which has caused it to be named the faculty of taking infinite pains. Melloni's subsequent labors justified this last definition also; but I can not speak of them here, further than to say that, after going over a large part of his work myself, with modern methods and with better apparatus, he seems to me the man, of all great students of our subject, who, in reference to what he accomplished, made the fewest mistakes.

Melloni is very great as an experimenter, and owes much of his success to the use of the newly invented thermopile, which is partly his own. I can here, however, speak only of his results, and of but two of these—one generally known; the other, and the more important, singularly little known, at least in connection with him. The first is the full recognition of the fact, partly anticipated by De la Roche, that radiant heat is of different kinds, that the invisible emanations differ among themselves just as those of light do. Melloni not only established the fact, but invented a felicitous term for it, which did a great deal to stamp it on recognition—the term "thermochrose," or heat-color, which