Chapter 15 of 50 · 3822 words · ~19 min read

Part 15

to the other throughout the motion. For instance, the energy of a pendulum is wholly potential when it is momentarily at rest at the top of its swing, but is wholly kinetic when the pendulum is moving with its maximum velocity at the lowest point of its swing. The whole energy at any moment is the sum of the potential and kinetic energy, and this sum remains constant so long as the amplitude of the vibration remains the same. The potential energy of a weight W lb. raised to a height h ft. above the earth, is Wh foot-pounds. If allowed to fall freely, without doing work, its kinetic energy on reaching the earth would be Wh foot-pounds, and its velocity of motion would be such that if projected upwards with the same velocity it would rise to the height h from which it fell. We have here a simple and familiar case of the conversion of one kind of energy into a different kind. But the two kinds of energy are mechanically equivalent, and they can both be measured in terms of the same units. The units already considered, namely foot-pounds or kilogrammetres, are gravitational units, depending on the force of gravity. This is the most obvious and natural method of measuring the potential energy of a raised weight, but it has the disadvantage of varying with the force of gravity at different places. The natural measure of the kinetic energy of a moving body is the product of its mass by half the square of its velocity, which gives a measure in kinetic or absolute units independent of the force of gravity. Kinetic and gravitational units are merely different ways of measuring the same thing. Just as foot-pounds may be reduced to kilogrammetres by dividing by the number of foot-pounds in one kilogrammetre, so kinetic may be reduced to gravitational units by dividing by the kinetic measure of the intensity of gravity, namely, the work in kinetic units done by the weight of unit mass acting through unit distance. For scientific purposes, it is necessary to take account of the variation of gravity. The scientific unit of energy is called the _erg_. The erg is the kinetic energy of a mass of 2 gm. moving with a velocity of 1 cm. per sec. The work in ergs done by a force acting through a distance of 1 cm. is the absolute measure of the force. A force equal to the weight of 1 gm. (in England) acting through a distance of 1 cm. does 981 ergs of work. A force equal to the weight of 1000 gm. (1 kilogramme) acting through a distance of 1 metre (100 cm.) does 98.1 million ergs of work. As the erg is a very small unit, for many purposes, a unit equal to 10 million ergs, called a _joule_, is employed. In England, where the weight of 1 gm. is 981 ergs per cm., a foot-pound is equal to 1.356 joules, and a kilogrammetre is equal to 9.81 joules.

The term _power_ is now generally restricted to mean "rate of working." Watt estimated that an average horse was capable of raising 550 lb. 1 ft. in each second, or doing work at the rate of 550 foot-pounds per second, or 33,000 foot-pounds per minute. This conventional horse-power is the unit commonly employed for estimating the power of engines. The _horse-power-hour_, or the work done by one horse-power in one hour, is nearly 2 million foot-pounds. For electrical and scientific purposes the unit of power employed is called the _watt_. The watt is the work per second done by an electromotive force of 1 volt in driving a current of 1 ampere, and is equal to 10 million ergs or 1 joule per second. One horse-power is 746 watts or nearly 3/4 of a kilowatt. The _kilowatt-hour_, which is the unit by which electrical energy is sold, is 3.6 million joules or 2.65 million foot-pounds, or 366,000 kilogrammetres, and is capable of raising nearly 19 lb. of water from the freezing to the boiling point.

[2] In an essay on "Heat, Light, and Combinations of Light," republished in Sir H. Davy's _Collected Works_, ii. (London, 1836).

[3] For instance a mass of compressed air, if allowed to expand in a cylinder at the ordinary temperature, will do work, and will at the same time absorb a quantity of heat which, as we now know, is the thermal equivalent of the work done. But this work cannot be said to have been produced solely from the heat absorbed in the process, because the air at the end of the process is in a changed condition, and could not be restored to its original state at the same temperature without having work done upon it precisely equal to that obtained by its expansion. The process could not be repeated indefinitely without a continual supply of compressed air. The source of the work in this case is work previously done in compressing the air, and no part of the work is really generated at the expense of heat alone, unless the compression is effected at a lower temperature than the expansion.

[4] Clausius (_Pogg. Ann._ 79, p. 369) and others have misinterpreted this assumption, and have taken it to mean that the quantity of heat required to produce any given change of state is independent of the manner in which the change is effected, which Carnot does not here assume.

[5] Carnot's description of his cycle and statement of his principle have been given as nearly as possible in his own words, because some injustice has been done him by erroneous descriptions and statements.

[6] It was for this reason that Professor W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin) stated (_Phil. Mag._, 1852, 4) that "Carnot's original demonstration utterly fails," and that he introduced the "corrections" attributed to James Thomson and Clerk Maxwell respectively. In reality Carnot's original demonstration requires no correction.

[7] In reference to this objection, Tyndall remarks (_Phil. Mag._, 1862, p. 422; _Heat_, p. 385); "In the first place the plate of salt nearest the source of heat is never moistened, unless the experiments are of the roughest character. Its proximity to the source enables the heat to chase away every trace of humidity from its surface." He therefore took precautions to dry only the circumferential portions of the plate nearest the pile, assuming that the flux of heat through the central portions would suffice to keep them dry. This reasoning is not at all satisfactory, because rocksalt is very hygroscopic and becomes wet, even in unsaturated air, if the vapour pressure is greater than that of a saturated solution of salt at the temperature of the plate. Assuming that the vapour pressure of the saturated salt solution is only half that of pure water, it would require an elevation of temperature of 10 deg. C. to dry the rocksalt plates in saturated air at 15 deg. C. It is only fair to say that the laws of the vapour pressures of solutions were unknown in Tyndall's time, and that it was usual to assume that the plates would not become wetted until the dew-point was reached. The writer has repeated Tyndall's experiments with a facsimile of one of Tyndall's tubes in the possession of the Royal College of Science, fitted with plates of rocksalt cut from the same block as Tyndall's, and therefore of the same hygroscopic quality. Employing a reflecting galvanometer in conjunction with a differential bolometer, which is quicker in its

## action than Tyndall's pile, there appears to be hardly any difference

between dry and moist air, provided that the latter is not more than half saturated. Using saturated air with a Leslie cube as source of heat, both rocksalt plates invariably become wet in a minute or two and the absorption rises to 10 or 20% according to the thickness of the film of deposited moisture. Employing the open tube method as described by Tyndall, without the rocksalt plates, the absorption is certainly less than 1% in 3 ft. of air saturated at 20 deg. C., unless condensation is induced on the walls of the tube. It is possible that the walls of Tyndall's tube may have become covered with a very hygroscopic film from the powder of the calcium chloride which he was in the habit of introducing near one end. Such a film would be exceedingly difficult to remove, and would account for the excessive precautions which he found necessary in drying the air in order to obtain the same transmitting power as a vacuum. It is probable that Tyndall's experiments on aqueous vapour were effected by experimental errors of this character.

HEATH, BENJAMIN (1704-1766), English classical scholar and bibliophile, was born at Exeter on the 20th of April 1704. He was the son of a wealthy merchant, and was thus able to devote himself mainly to travel and book-collecting. He became town clerk of his native city in 1752, and held the office till his death on the 13th of September 1766. In 1763 he had published a pamphlet advocating the repeal of the cider tax in Devonshire, and his endeavours led to success three years later. As a classical scholar he made his reputation by his critical and metrical notes on the Greek tragedians, which procured him an honorary D.C.L. from Oxford (31st of March 1752). He also left MS. notes on Burmann's and Martyn's editions of Virgil, on Euripides, Catullus, Tibullus, and the greater part of Hesiod. In some of these he adopts the whimsical name Dexiades Ericius. His _Revisal of Shakespear's Text_ (1765) was an answer to the "insolent dogmatism" of Bishop Warburton. _The Essay towards a Demonstrative Proof of the Divine Existence, Unity and Attributes_ (1740) was intended to combat the opinions of Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume. Two of his sons (among a family of thirteen) were Benjamin, headmaster of Harrow (1771-1785), and George, headmaster of Eton (1796). His collection of rare classical works formed the nucleus of his son Benjamin's famous library (Bibliotheca Heathiana).

An account of the Heath family will be found in Sir W. R. Drake's _Heathiana_ (1882).

HEATH, NICHOLAS (c. 1501-1578), archbishop of York and lord chancellor, was born in London about 1501 and graduated B.A. at Oxford in 1519. He then migrated to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1520, M.A. in 1522, and was elected fellow in 1524. After holding minor preferments he was appointed archdeacon of Stafford in 1534 and graduated D.D. in 1535. He then accompanied Edward Fox (q.v.), bishop of Hereford, on his mission to promote a theological and political understanding with the Lutheran princes of Germany. His selection for this duty implies a readiness on Heath's part to proceed some distance along the path of reform; but his dealings with the Lutherans did not confirm this tendency, and Heath's subsequent career was closely associated with the cause of reaction. In 1539, the year of the Six Articles, he was made bishop of Rochester, and in 1543 he succeeded Latimer at Worcester. His Catholicism, however, was of a less rigid type than Gardiner's and Bonner's; he felt something of the force of the national antipathy to foreign influence, whether ecclesiastical or secular, and was always impressed by the necessity of national unity, so far as was possible, in matters of faith. Apparently he made no difficulty about carrying out the earlier reforms of Edward VI., and he accepted the first book of common prayer after it had been modified by the House of Lords in a Catholic direction.

His definite breach with the Reformation occurred on the grounds, on which four centuries later Leo XIII. denied the Catholicity of the reformed English Church, namely, on the question of the Ordinal drawn up in February 1550. Heath refused to accept it, was imprisoned, and in 1551 deprived of his bishopric. On Mary's accession he was released and restored, and made president of the council of the Marches and Wales. In 1555 he was promoted to the archbishopric of York, which he did much to enrich after the Protestant spoliation; he built York House in the Strand. After Gardiner's death he was appointed lord chancellor, probably on Pole's recommendation; for Heath, like Pole himself, disliked the Spanish party in England. Unlike Pole, however, he seems to have been averse from the excessive persecution of Mary's reign, and no Protestants were burnt in his diocese. He exercised, however, little influence on Mary's secular or ecclesiastical policy.

On Mary's death Heath as chancellor at once proclaimed Elizabeth. Like Sir Thomas More he held that it was entirely within the competence of the national state, represented by parliament, to determine questions of the succession to the throne; and although Elizabeth did not renew his commission as lord chancellor, he continued to sit in the privy council for two months until the government had determined to complete the breach with the Roman Catholic Church; and as late as April 1559 he assisted the government by helping to arrange the Westminster Conference, and reproving his more truculent co-religionists. He refused to crown Elizabeth because she would not have the coronation service accompanied with the elevation of the Host; and ecclesiastical ceremonies and doctrine could not, in Heath's view, be altered or abrogated by any mere national authority. Hence he steadily resisted Elizabeth's acts of supremacy and uniformity, although he had acquiesced in the acts of 1534 and 1549. Like others of Henry's bishops, he had been convinced by the events of Edward VI.'s reign that Sir Thomas More was right and Henry VIII. was wrong in their attitude towards the claims of the papacy and the Catholic Church. He was therefore necessarily deprived of his archbishopric in 1559, but he remained loyal to Elizabeth; and after a temporary confinement he was suffered to pass the remaining nineteen years of his life in peace and quiet, never attending public worship and sometimes hearing mass in private. The queen visited him more than once at his house at Chobham, Surrey; he died and was buried there at the end of 1578.

AUTHORITIES.--Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.; Acts of the Privy Council; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, Spanish and Venetian; Kemp's Loseley MSS.; Froude's _History_; Burnet, Collier, Dixon and Frere's _Church Histories_; Strype's _Works_ (General Index); Parker Soc. Publications (Gough's Index); Birt's _Elizabethan Settlement_. (A. F. P.)

HEATH, WILLIAM (1737-1814), American soldier, was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on the 2nd of March 1737 (old style). He was brought up as a farmer and had a passion for military exercises. In 1765 he entered the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company of Boston, of which he became commander in 1770. In the same year he wrote to the _Boston Gazette_ letters signed "A Military Countryman," urging the necessity of military training. He was a member of the Massachusetts General Court from 1770 to 1774, of the provincial committee of safety, and in 1774-1775 of the provincial congress. He was commissioned a provincial brig.-general in December 1774, directed the pursuit of the British from Concord (April 19, 1775), was promoted to be provincial major-general on the 20th of June 1775, and two days later was commissioned fourth brig.-general in the Continental Army. He became major-general on the 9th of August 1776, and was in active service around New York until early the next year. In January 1777 he attempted to take Fort Independence, near Spuyten Duyvil, then garrisoned by about 2000 Hessians, but at the first sally of the garrison his troops became panic-stricken and a few days later he withdrew. Washington reprimanded him and never again entrusted to him any important operation in the field. Throughout the war, however, Heath was very efficient in muster service and in the barracks. From March 1777 to October 1778 he was in command of the Eastern Department with headquarters at Boston, and had charge (Nov. 1777-Oct. 1778) of the prisoners of war from Burgoyne's army held at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In May 1779 he was appointed a commissioner of the Board of War. He was placed in command of the troops on the E. side of the Hudson in June 1779, and of other troops and posts on the Hudson in November of the same year. In July 1780 he met the French allies under Rochambeau on their arrival in Rhode Island; in October of the same year he succeeded Arnold in command of West Point and its dependencies; and in August 1781, when Washington went south to meet Cornwallis, Heath was left in command of the Army of the Hudson to watch Clinton. After the war he retired to his farm at Roxbury, was a member of the state House of Representatives in 1788, of the Massachusetts convention which ratified the Federal Constitution in the same year, and of the governor's council in 1789-1790, was a state senator (1791-1793), and in 1806 was elected lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts but declined to serve. He died at Roxbury on the 24th of January 1814, the last of the major-generals of the War of American Independence.

See _Memoirs of Major-General Heath, containing Anecdotes, Details of Skirmishes, Battles and other Military Events during the American War, written by Himself_ (Boston, 1798; frequently reprinted, perhaps the best edition being that published in New York in 1901 by William Abbatt), particularly valuable for the descriptions of Lexington and Bunker Hill, of the fighting around New York, of the controversies with Burgoyne and his officers during their stay in Boston, and of relations with Rochambeau; and his correspondence, _The Heath Papers_, vols. iv.-v., seventh series, _Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_ (Boston, 1904-1905).

HEATH, the English form of a name given in most Teutonic dialects to the common ling or heather (_Calluna vulgaris_), but now applied to all species of _Erica_, an extensive genus of monopetalous plants, belonging to the order Ericaceae. The heaths are evergreen shrubs, with small narrow leaves, in whorls usually set rather thickly on the shoots; the persistent flowers have 4 sepals, and a 4-cleft campanulate or tubular corolla, in many species more or less ventricose or inflated; the dry capsule is 4-celled, and opens, in the true Ericae, in 4 segments, to the middle of which the partitions adhere, though in the ling the valves separate at the dissepiments. The plants are mostly of low growth, but several African kinds reach the size of large bushes, and a common South European species, _E. arborea_, occasionally attains almost the aspect and dimensions of a tree.

[Illustration: FIG. 1. _Calluna vulgaris._]

One of the best known and most interesting of the family is the common heath, heather or ling, _Calluna vulgaris_ (fig. 1), placed by most botanists in a separate genus on account of the peculiar dehiscence of the fruit, and from the coloured calyx, which extends beyond the corolla, having a whorl of sepal-like bracts beneath. This shrub derives some economic importance from its forming the chief vegetation on many of those extensive wastes that occupy so large a portion of the more sterile lands of northern and western Europe, the usually desolate appearance of which is enlivened in the latter part of summer by its abundant pink blossoms. When growing erect to the height of 3 ft. or more, as it often does in sheltered places, its purple stems, close-leaved green shoots and feathery spikes of bell-shaped flowers render it one of the handsomest of the heaths; but on the bleaker elevations and more arid slopes it frequently rises only a few inches above the ground. In all moorland countries the ling is applied to many rural purposes; the larger stems are made into brooms, the shorter tied up into bundles that serve as brushes, while the long trailing shoots are woven into baskets. Pared up with the peat about its roots it forms a good fuel, often the only one obtainable on the drier moors. The shielings of the Scottish Highlanders were formerly constructed of heath stems, cemented together with peat-mud, worked into a kind of mortar with dry grass or straw; hovels and sheds for temporary purposes are still sometimes built in a similar way, and roofed in with ling. Laid on the ground, with the flowers above, it forms a soft springy bed, the luxurious couch of the ancient Gael, still gladly resorted to at times by the hill shepherd or hardy deer-stalker. The young shoots were in former days employed as a substitute for hops in brewing, while their astringency rendered them valuable as a tanning material in Ireland and the Western Isles. They are said also to have been used by the Highlanders for dyeing woollen yarn yellow, and other colours are asserted to have been obtained from them, but some writers appear to confuse the dyer's-weed, _Genista tinctoria_, with the heather. The young juicy shoots and the seeds, which remain long in the capsules, furnish the red grouse of Scotland with the larger portion of its sustenance; the ripe seeds are eaten by many birds. The tops of the ling afford a considerable part of the winter fodder of the hill flocks, and are popularly supposed to communicate the fine flavour to Welsh and Highland mutton, but sheep seldom crop heather while the mountain grasses and rushes are sweet and accessible. Ling has been suggested as a material for paper, but the stems are hardly sufficiently fibrous for that purpose. The purple or fine-leaved heath, _E. cinerea_ (fig. 2), one of the most beautiful of the genus, abounds on the lower moors and commons of Great Britain and western Europe, in such situations being sometimes more prevalent than the ling. The flowers of both these species yield much honey, furnishing a plentiful supply to the bees in moorland districts; from this heath honey the Picts probably brewed the mead said by Boetius to have been made from the flowers themselves.

The genus contains about 420 known species, by far the greater part being indigenous to the western districts of South Africa, but it is also a characteristic genus of the Mediterranean region, while several species extend into northern Europe. No species is native in America, but ling occurs as an introduced plant on the Atlantic side from Newfoundland to New Jersey. Five species occur in Britain: _E. cinerea_, _E. tetralix_ (cross-leaved heath), both abundant on heaths and commons, _E. vagans_, Cornish heath, found only in West Cornwall, _E. ciliaris_ in the west of England and Ireland and _E. mediterranea_ in Ireland. The three last are south-west European species which reach the northern limit of their distribution in the west of England and Ireland. _E. scoparia_ is a common heath in the centre of France and elsewhere in the Mediterranean region, forming a spreading bush several feet high. It is known as _bruyere_, and its stout underground rootstocks yield the briar-wood used for pipes.

[Illustration: FIG. 2. _Erica cinerea._]