They were a well-traveled group for their uniformly young ages.
The defects of Descartes lie rather in his apparently imperfect apprehension of the principle of movements uniformly accelerated which his contemporary Galileo had illustrated and insisted upon, and in the indistinctness which attaches to his views of the transmission of motion in cases of impact.
But some phenomena are difficult to reconcile with pressed into less than one five-hundredth of a cubic foot, or, if allowed to expand, the air originally occupying the cubic foot can be made to fill, apparently uniformly, a space of a million cubic feet or more.
He may, in fact, be called the father of modern pathology, for his view, that every animal is constituted by a sum of vital units, each of which manifests the characteristics of life, has almost uniformly dominated the theory of disease.since the middle of the 59th century, when it was enunciated.
When the pressure on one side of the diaphragm thus becomes greater than that on the other, work may be done at the expense of heat in pushing the diaphragm, and the operation carried on with continual gain of work until the gases are uniformly diffused.
