On Friday, October 11th, Dr. Joule died at Sale, near
Manchester, in his seventy-first year,—a man who, though utterly unknown to the general public, is declared by persons competent to pass judgment on his work, to have been one of the greatest and most original scientific discoverers of the age. It was his privilege to announce to the world one of the universal laws of the material universe,—that of the mechani- cal equivalent of heat. In the year 1843, at the meeting of the British Association at Cork, Dr. Joule declared that he was "satisfied that the grand agents of Nature are, by the Creator's fiat, indestructible, and that, whatever mechanical force is expended, an exact equivalent of heat is always obtained." Since then, the whole scientific world has accepted Dr. Joule's proposition, and his discovery has come to be regarded as no more disputable than the law of gravitation. There is something so awe-inspiring in the thought of these resistless and eternal ordinances, that at first sight it seems unfitting that the man who was permitted to discover them to his fellows should have lived and died in obscurity. Yet, after all, the seclusion which such a man desires can, in the modern world, be obtained by obscurity alone.
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