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Updated: May 24, 2025
"Gallia, then, has some internal heat," said Servadac. "And why not, captain?" rejoined the lieutenant. "If our asteroid has carried with it a portion of the old earth's atmosphere, why should it not likewise retain something of its central fire?" "Ah, well!" said the captain, shrugging his shoulders, "I dare say there is caloric enough in our little world to supply the wants of its population."
The introduction of this term appears altogether unnecessary, when the sense in which the word heat should be understood is explained. Caloric means the cause of the sensation heat: and there seems no reason to fear that the perception of heat by the organs of sensation can ever be misunderstood to be the agent in chemical phenomena. Omniscience displayed in the constitution of the Atmosphere.
Without going back to early and isolated attempts like those of Daniel Bernoulli, who, in his hydrodynamics, propounded the basis of the kinetic theory of gases, or the researches of Boyle on friction, we may recall, to show how it was propounded in former times, a rather forgotten page of the Mémoire sur la Chaleur, published in 1780 by Lavoisier and Laplace: "Other physicists," they wrote, after setting out the theory of caloric, "think that heat is nothing but the result of the insensible vibrations of matter.... In the system we are now examining, heat is the vis viva resulting from the insensible movements of the molecules of a body; it is the sum of the products of the mass of each molecule by the square of its velocity.... We shall not decide between the two preceding hypotheses; several phenomena seem to support the last mentioned for instance, that of the heat produced by the friction of two solid bodies.
We may easily conceive that by a sudden change from a state of thaw to an intense frost attended by a strong wind, the whole body of water in a river may become quickly cooled, and consequently diminish the temperature of the stone or gravel over which it flows; but to suppose that water which is not itself at freezing- point is capable of reducing the substances in contact with it by means of a continual application of successive particles so far beneath that temperature as in process of time to convert the contiguous water to ice, seems not to accord very well with the usually received theory of the equilibrium of caloric.
Further experiments are to be made; meanwhile, the inventor says, 'that the weapon of the earliest inhabitants of Australia has now led to the determination mathematically of the true form by which alone, on the screw principle, high speed on water can be obtained. The Ericsson caloric ship is launched; but if a new projector is to be believed, the maker may save himself all further trouble, for Mr Burn proposes to build square ships, with the bottoms constructed as double inclined planes, which shall cross from England to America in forty-eight hours!
In a word, all inanimate substances that contain the elements of caloric appear to sympathize with the prevailing state of the atmosphere, and to contribute to render that which is already too cold for comfort, even colder. So it was now; notwithstanding the preparations that had been made. Baffled twice in his expectations of procuring a blaze, Stephen stopped and took a drink of the hot coffee.
Stretched out before her was the garden with its intensely vivid flowers. To look at them merely was to increase one's caloric condition.
It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the life that warms them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly warms her thin fingers, but she has melted all the ice out of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the blood of her youthful heroes.
On the other hand, viscosity in liquids is never non-existent; for were it so for water, for example, in the celebrated experiment effected by Joule for the determination of the mechanical equivalent of the caloric, the liquid borne along by the floats would slide without friction on the surrounding liquid, and the work done by movement would be the same whether the floats did or did not plunge into the liquid mass.
The ideas of caloric, whether as substance or property, and the conceptions of latent heat, the heat in ice, &c., that excite the wonder or the laughter of the vulgar, though susceptible of the most important practical applications, are the result of this abstraction; while the only purpose to which a definition like the preceding could become subservient, would be in supplying a nomenclature with the character of the most common species of a genus—its genus generalissimum, and even this would be useless in the present instance, inasmuch as it presupposes the knowledge of the things characterised.
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