A Log Book is a marine or sea journal, containing, in the British navy, the speed, course, leeway, direction and force of the wind, state of the weather, and barometric and thermometric observations.
He remarks that ” the law according to which the motive power of heat varies at different points of the thermometric scale is intimately connected with that of the variations of the specific heats of gases at different temperatures - a law which experiment has not yet made known to us with sufficient exactness."
He experimented with an air-thermometer, in which the temperature was defined by measurement of the length of a column of mercury; and he pointed out that the extreme cold of such a thermometer would be that which reduced the "spring" of the air to nothing, thus being the first to recognize that the use of air as a thermometric substance led to the inference of the existence of a zero of temperature.
If Q is expressed in terms of this unit in equation (I), it is necessary to divide by c, or to replace k on the right-hand side by the ratio k/c. This ratio determines the rate of diffusion of temperature, and is called the thermometric conductivity or, more shortly, the diffusivity.
The methods of measurement, founded on rise of temperature, may be classed as thermometric methods, since they depend on the observation of change of temperature with a thermometer.