From Thomas Beddoes to William Reynolds   April 1798

It is strange that so many people should turn against caloric as a substance, at once. I have been long dissatisfied with the common doctrine. In my lectures, I preferred the hypothesis of motion; and indeed the miserable abuse of the theory of latent heat by Lavoisier, seems to me to render its non-existence as clear as any proposition indirectly demonstrated by Euclid. You will see Count Rumford’s experiments in the volume of the philosophical transactions just published; and a new correspondent who, by the way, does not know of these experiments, and who seems a clever man, offers me a perusal of some new ones, on friction and percussion, which he says, prove heat to be but motion.