It is, therefore, rightly considered that the scholars who were the first to doubt the material nature of caloric were the precursors of R.
Mayer; their ideas, however, were the same as those of the celebrated German doctor, for they sought especially to demonstrate that heat was a mode of motion.
Without going back to early and isolated attempts like those of Daniel Bernoulli, who, in his hydrodynamics, propounded the basis of the kinetic theory of gases, or the researches of Boyle on friction, we may recall, to show how it was propounded in former times, a rather forgotten page of the _Memoire sur la Chaleur_, published in 1780 by Lavoisier and Laplace: "Other physicists," they wrote, after setting out the theory of caloric, "think that heat is nothing but the result of the insensible vibrations of matter....

In the system we are now examining, heat is the _vis viva_ resulting from the insensible movements of the molecules of a body; it is the sum of the products of the mass of each molecule by the square of its velocity....

We shall not decide between the two preceding hypotheses; several phenomena seem to support the last mentioned--for instance, that of the heat produced by the friction of two solid bodies.

But there are others which are more simply explained by the first, and perhaps they both operate at once." Most of the physicists of that period, however, did not share the prudent doubts of Lavoisier and Laplace.

They admitted, without hesitation, the first hypothesis; and, four years after the appearance of the _Memoire sur la Chaleur_, Sigaud de Lafond, a professor of physics of great reputation, wrote: "Pure Fire, free from all state of combination, seems to be an assembly of particles of a simple, homogeneous, and absolutely unalterable matter, and all the properties of this element indicate that these particles are infinitely small and free, that they have no sensible cohesion, and that they are moved in every possible direction by a continual and rapid motion which is essential to them....