Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/25

Rh was eight. Carnot had done his grandest work of the century in his province of thought, and had passed into the Unseen, at thirty-six; his one little volume, which has made him immortal, was written when he was but twenty-three or twenty-four. It is unnecessary, here, to enter into the particulars of his life; that has been given us in ample detail in the admirable sketch by his brother which is here republished. It will be quite sufficient to indicate, in a few words, what were the conditions amid which he lived and the relation of his work to that great science of which it was the first exposition.

At the time of Carnot, the opinion of the scientific world was divided, as it had been for centuries, on the question of the true nature of heat and light, and as it still is, to a certain extent, regarding electricity. On the one hand it was held by the best-known physicists that heat is a substance which pervades all bodies in greater or less amount, and that heating and cooling are simply the absorption and the rejection of this “imponderable substance” by the body affected; while, on the other hand, it was asserted by a small but increasing number that heat is a “mode of motion,” a form of energy, not only imponderable, but actually immaterial; a quality