Note 811 — Chapter V · (continued 2)

In the paper which he communicated to the Royal Society, announcing his discovery, he, well knowing the empirical character of the English mind, apologizes for this; and says, ‘I feel much reluctance to lay my thoughts on these subjects before the public in their present indigested state, and without having been able to bring them to the test of such experiments as would confirm or refute them.’ Watt's Correspondence on the Discovery of the Composition of Water, pp. 77, 78. Eleven months earlier, that is in December 1782, he writes (Ibid. p. 4): ‘Dr. Priestley has made a most surprising discovery, which seems to confirm my theory of water's undergoing some very remarkable change at the point where all its latent heat would be changed into sensible heat.’