Excerpt from General Physics: An Elementary Treatise on Natural Philosophy

The teaching of elementary physics in our colleges and technical schools has been growing more and more exacting for many years, and the ideal would seem to be an inescapable rigor, as in the teaching of mathematics, combined with a powerful imaginative stimulus such as can be realized only in the teaching of Natural Philosophy. We have prepared this elementary treatise on physics as a further step towards this ideal.

A clear understanding of the two great generalizations of physics, namely, the Conservation of Energy and the Law of Entropy, would alone constitute a very considerable knowledge of Natural Philosophy, and we have therefore devoted a good deal of space to these things. See, particularly, Arts. 48, 80-81 and 103-111.

A clear understanding of Natural Philosophy is very greatly promoted by developing the contrasts between the methods of Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Atomics (the Atomic Theory) and Statistical Physics. The difference between Mechanics and Thermodynamics is set forth sufficiently by the difference between Parts I and II, Thermodynamics and Atomics arc contrasted in Art. 79, Mechanics and Atomics are contrasted in Art. 227, and the student is referred to a very simple article on Statistical Physics in Science for August 4, 1916, pages 158-162.

The Atomic theory is used but little in this text. We are sure that it would be a mistake to devote much space to the purely descriptive phases of the atomic theory in our treatment of heat, let the student go to Tyndall's book entitled Heat, A Mode of Motion. Likewise we believe that it would be incompatible with the main purpose of this text to devote much space to the purely descriptive phases of the atomic theory of electricity and magnetism.

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