XIV. On the Specific Heat of the Gases

Abstract

The experiments which I now submit to the Royal Society are repetitions of those I made many months ago, for the purpose of ascertaining the Specific Heats of the Gases. The importance of the subject so impressed my mind, that I determined to spare no pains in the prosecution of the inquiry, and therefore I willingly withheld my first experiments from the public eye, until, by a fresh series, I might present them with the greater confidence. The apparatus employed in these experiments was calculated to operate upon greater quantities of the Gases than the former one, and as every precaution which had been suggested was adopted, they have, perhaps, given even more decisive results than the last. The results themselves, however, are in every important particular exactly the same. It is also but justice to myself to state, that the conclusions which the former experiments led to, were exactly the reverse of what I had anticipated, and that they seemed at the time totally opposed to the doctrines of Black and Crawford, which I am still disposed to credit to a limited degree.