particles of a simple, homogeneous, and absolutely unalterable matter, and all the properties of this element indicate that these particles are infinitely small and free, that they have no sensible cohesion, and that they are moved in every possible direction by a continual and rapid motion which is essential to them....  The extreme tenacity and the surprising mobility of its molecules are manifestly shown by the ease with which it penetrates into the most compact bodies and by its tendency to put itself in equilibrium throughout all bodies near to it.”

It must be acknowledged, however, that the idea of Lavoisier and Laplace was rather vague and even inexact on one important point.  They admitted it to be evident that “all variations of heat, whether real or apparent, undergone by a bodily system when changing its state, are produced in inverse order when the system passes back to its original state.”  This phrase is the very denial of equivalence where these changes of state are accompanied by external work.

Laplace, moreover, himself became later a very convinced partisan of the hypothesis of the material nature of caloric, and his immense authority, so fortunate in other respects for the development of science, was certainly in this case the cause of the retardation of progress.

The names of Young, Rumford, Davy, are often quoted among those physicists who, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, caught sight of the new truths as to the nature of heat.  To these names is very properly added that of Sadi Carnot.  A note found among his papers unquestionably proves that, before 1830, ideas had occurred to him from which it resulted that in producing work an equivalent amount of heat was destroyed.  But the year 1842 is particularly memorable in the history of science as the year in which Jules Robert Mayer succeeded, by an entirely personal effort, in really enunciating the principle of the conservation of energy.  Chemists recall with just pride that the Remarques sur les forces de la nature animee, contemptuously rejected by all the journals of physics, were received and published in the Annalen of Liebig.  We ought never to forget this example, which shows with what difficulty a new idea contrary to the classic theories of the period succeeds in coming to the front; but extenuating circumstances may be urged on behalf of the physicists.

Robert Mayer had a rather insufficient mathematical education, and his Memoirs, the Remarques, as well as the ulterior publications, Memoire sur le mouvement organique et la nutrition and the Materiaux pour la dynamique du ciel, contain, side by side with very profound ideas, evident errors in mechanics.  Thus it often happens that discoveries put forward in a somewhat vague manner by adventurous minds not overburdened by the heavy baggage of scientific erudition, who audaciously press forward in advance of their time, fall into quite intelligible oblivion until rediscovered, clarified, and put into shape by slower but surer seekers.  This was the case with the ideas of Mayer.  They were not understood at first sight, not only on account of their originality, but also because they were couched in incorrect language.