HEAT,
CONSIDERED AS A MODE OF MOTION,
Being a Course of Twelve Lectures delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
BY JOHN TYNDALL, F. R. S.
PROFESSOR OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE ROYAL INSTITUTION—AUTHOR OF THE “GLACIERS OF THE ALPS.”
With One Hundred Illustrations. 8vo., 480 pages. Price, $2.00.
This volume is by the gifted successor of Faraday, the young Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Royal Institution of England. The author, himself celebrated as a discoverer, an ingenious and fertile experimenter, a bold but disciplined thinker, a vivid and imaginative speaker, and dealing with the most splendid generalizations and the grandest phenomena of nature, was listened to with the profoundest attention. The new views of the nature of heat, its connections with the other forms of force, and the sublime part it plays in the scheme of Nature—views which have but recently been adopted in the scientific world—are here for the first time brought forward, and illustrated with a resource of experiment, a brilliancy of illustration, and a clearness and eloquence of style for which Professor Tyndall is unequalled.
From the American Journal of Science.—With all the skill which has made Faraday the master of experimental science in Great Britain, Professor Tyndall enjoys the advantage of a superior general culture, and is thus enabled to set forth his philosophy with all the graces of eloquence and the finish of superior diction. With a simplicity, and absence of technicalities which render his explanations lucid to unscientific minds, and at the same time a thoroughness and originality by which he instructs the most learned, he unfolds all the modern philosophy of heat.
New York Times.—Professor Tyndall’s course of lectures on heat is one of the most beautiful illustrations of a mode of handling scientific subjects, which is comparatively new, and which promises the best results, both to science and to literature generally; we mean the treatment of subjects in a style at once profound and popular. The title of Professor Tyndall’s work indicates the theory of heat held by him, and indeed the only one now held by scientific men—it is a mode of motion.
Boston Journal.—He exhibits the curious and beautiful workings of nature in a most delightful manner. Before the reader particles of water lock themselves or fly asunder with a movement regulated like a dance. They form themselves into liquid flowers with fine serrated petals, or into rosettes of frozen gauze, they bound upward in boiling fountains, or creep slowly onward in stupendous glaciers. Flames burst into music and sing, or cease to sing, as the experimenter pleases, and metals paint themselves upon a screen in dazzling hues as the painter touches his canvas.