Note 26 — Front matter (continued 7)

My occasional use of the word 'heat' where in scientific writing 'temperature' would be the word used, has exposed me to peevish, not to say petulant comments from Professor P.G. Tait, who has denounced half the mathematical world for using the word 'force,' in the sense in which Newton used it, and has spoken of an eminent physicist as one deserving universal execration and opprobrium for not explaining, when speaking of work done against gravity, that terrestrial gravity was meant, and not gravity on the sun, or Jupiter, or Mars, or anywhere in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, but only at the earth's surface. Where there is no risk of confusion, the word 'heat' may be used either to signify temperature, as when in ordinary speech and writing we talk of blood-heat, fever-heat, summer-heat, and so forth. Science, indeed, very properly forbids the use of the word in any sense save one. But outside the pages of scientific treatises, there is no inaccuracy in using a word in a sense popularly attributed to it, when no mistake can possibly arise. No one can suppose, when I speak of a heat of so many degrees Fahrenheit or Centigrade, that I mean anything but such and such a degree of heat, any more than if I spoke of the intense heat of that savant entêté, Professor P.G. Tait, any one would imagine that I referred to his calorific condition.