Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/20

xii more firmly and closely those bonds of kindly thought and feeling which are growing continually more numerous and stronger as the nations are brought to see that humanity is larger and more important than political divisions, and that the labors of educated men and of the guiding minds in the great industries are constantly doing more to promote a true brotherhood of mankind than ever have, or ever can, the greatest statesmen.

When the wonderful intellectual accomplishments of men like the elder Sadi Carnot become known and appreciated by the world, much more will have been accomplished in this direction. It is perhaps from this point of view that the importance of such work will be most fully recognized. When the little treatise which is here for the first time published in English becomes familiar to those for whom it is intended, it will be, to many at least, a matter of surprise no less than pleasure to discover that France has produced a writer on this now familiar subject whose inspiration anticipated many of the principles that those founders of the modern science, Rankine and Clausius, worked out through the tedious and difficult methods of the higher mathematics, and which were hailed by their contemporaries as marvellous discoveries.