Item 29 - James David Forbes to William Whewell

Edinburgh - JDF would like WW to be at the next meeting of the Council of the Royal Society, where they are going to discuss JDF's paper - 'On the Hot Springs of the Pyrenees and the Verification of Thermometers'. The Society referees suggested the results should begin in a tabular form, which would have meant JDF restructuring more than two thirds of the paper. He complained to the Secretary of the Society and convinced the referees that they were wrong in their suggestion: 'excellent as is the system of Reference employed by the council, it has a dangerous tendency to degenerate into a system of minute interference to which few authors will submit, when papers of acknowledged merit stand a chance of rejection because their form or construction may not coincide with that which the individual to whom they may be referred, may think the best possible'. The paper is soon to be brought before the Council and JDF is keen for it to appear in the next issue of the Transactions of the Royal Society. JDF understands that 'a very engaging young man' (Robert Leslie Ellis) - who JDF met two years ago in Bath - is to be WW's student. JDF has 'set about getting Thermometers constructed up to 25 ft long for sinking in the ground. I mean to have one set in solid Trap Rock and another in sand or clay' [The purpose of these experiments was to ascertain the progress of solar heat in the crust of the globe]. What JDF has seen of Poisson's book on heat [S.D. Poisson, Theorie Mathematique de la Chaleur, 1835] 'does not at all raise my opinion of him as a Physician'.