the same way that Newton's law has survived the laws of Kepler from which it was derived, and which are no longer anything but approximations, if we take perturbations into account. Now why does this principle thus occupy a kind of privileged position among physical laws? There are many reasons for that. At the outset we think that we cannot reject it, or even doubt its absolute rigour, without admitting the possibility of perpetual motion; we certainly feel distrust at such a prospect, and we believe ourselves less rash in affirming it than in denying it. That perhaps is not quite accurate. The impossibility of perpetual motion only implies the conservation of energy for reversible phenomena. The imposing simplicity of Mayer's principle equally contributes to strengthen our faith. In a law immediately deduced from experiments, such as Mariotte's law, this simplicity would rather appear to us a reason for distrust; but here this is no longer the case. We take elements which at the first glance are unconnected; these arrange themselves in an unexpected order, and form a harmonious whole. We cannot believe that this unexpected harmony is a mere result of chance. Our conquest appears to be valuable to us in proportion to the efforts it has cost, and we feel the more certain of having snatched its true secret from Nature in proportion as Nature has appeared more jealous of our attempts to discover it. But these are only small reasons. Before we raise Mayer's law to the
