Clausius's “Mechanical Theory of Heat”

Abstract

THIS translation satisfies a real want of a tolerably large class of students of science. It furnishes in a volume of reasonable size a clear and readable account of a subject, an acquaintance with which has until lately been only obtainable by an English reader at the cost of a great deal of research through the transactions and memoirs of various societies. The name of its author furnishes a sufficient guarantee of the accuracy of the substance matter of the book, treating as it does of a subject specially his own. The method of treatment leaves hardly anything to be desired, even from the point of view of a student previously ignorant of the subject. The reader is nowhere perplexed by uncouth symbols or analytical operations beyond those which are familiar to all acquainted with the principles of the differential and integral calculus. At the same time, and perhaps partly in consequence of this avoidance of complicated analysis, the reader is never allowed to lose sight of the essential meaning of the symbols employed. Some of the chapters in the book will furnish a valuable exercise in the meaning and value of partial differential coefficients, even to a student who is not specially interested in the physical questions discussed. The same remark applies to some of the explanations given in the mathematical introduction, on the nature of the integral of a total differential in the case when the condition of being an exact differential is not fulfilled, explanations originally inserted, as the author tells us, in consequence of objections made to his theory by Prof. Decher. The Mechanical Theory of Heat. By R. Clausius. Translated by W. R. Browne, M.A. (London: Macmillan and Co.)