But, for a long time afterwards, the question made little progress, because there seemed to be hardly any means of introducing into this study the second principle of thermodynamics.[14] It was the memoir of Gibbs which at last opened out this rich domain and enabled it to be rationally exploited.

As early as 1886, M.Duhem showed that the theory of the thermodynamic potential furnished precise information on solutions or liquid mixtures.

He thus discovered over again the famous law on the lowering of the congelation temperature of solvents which had just been established by M.Raoult after a long series of now classic researches.
[Footnote 14: The "second principle" referred to has been thus enunciated: "In every engine that produces work there is a fall of temperature, and the maximum output of a perfect engine--_i.e._ the ratio between the heat consumed in work and the heat supplied--depends only on the extreme temperatures between which the fluid is evolved."-- Demanet, _Notes de Physique Experimentale_, Louvain, 1905, fasc.

2, p.147.Clausius put it in a negative form, as thus: No engine can of itself, without the aid of external agency, transfer heat from a body at low temperature to a body at a high temperature.
Cf.

Ganot's _Physics_, 17th English edition, Sec.