Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/23



I.

THE WORK OF SADI CARNOT.

was, perhaps, the greatest genius, in the department of physical science at least, that this century has produced. By this I mean that he possessed in highest degree that combination of the imaginative faculty with intellectual acuteness, great logical power and capacity for learning, classifying and organizing in their proper relations, all the facts, phenomena, and laws of natural science which distinguishes the real genius from other men and even from the simply talented man. Only now and then, in the centuries, does such a genius come into view. Euclid was such in mathematics; Newton was such in mechanics; Bacon and Compte were such in logic and philosophy; Lavoisier and Davy were such in chemistry; and Fourier, Thomson, 1