world of one of its noblest intellects, just when it was beginning its marvellous career.
The following sentence from Carnot illustrates in brief his wonderful prescience; one can hardly believe it possible that it should have been written in the first quarter of the nineteenth century: “On peut donc poser en thèse générale que la puissance motrice est en quantité invariable dans la Nature; qu'elle n'est jamais, à proprement parler, ni produite, ni détruite. A la vérité, elle change de forme, c'est a dire qu'elle produit tantôt un genre de mouvement, tantôt un autre; mais elle n'est jamais anéantie.” It is this man who has probably inaugurated the development of the modern science of thermodynamics and the whole range of sciences dependent upon it, and who has thus made it possible to construct a science of the energetics of the universe, and to read the mysteries of every physical phenomenon of nature; it is this man who has done more than any contemporary in his field, and who thus displayed a more brilliant genius than any man of science of the nineteenth century: yet not even his name appears in the biographical dictionaries; and in the Encyclopædia Britannica it is only to be found incidentally in the article on Thermodynamics.
Throughout his little book, we find numerous
