Abstract
THE discovery, in the first half of the seventeenth century, that the air has weight is associated with things of immense importance, for instance, the invention of the barometer and the refutation of the dogma—dear to the false science and the false philosophy of the day—that “Nature abhors a vacuum”. In a new edition of the “Essais de Jean Rey”, reviewed in NATURE of July 9, an attempt is made to assign this discovery to Rey, and, so far to regard Torricelli, Galileo, Pascal, and Descartes as his disciples. Without claiming to be an authority upon Rey or upon Galileo, I would direct attention to the statement, made in “Galileo—his Life and Work”, by J. J. Fahie, that Galileo's way of determining the specific gravity of the air was first described in his letter to Baliani dated March 12, 1613. Rey's “Essais” was published in the year 1630.
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MELDRUM, A. The Discovery of the Weight of the Air. Nature 78, 294 (1908). https://doi.org/10.1038/078294a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/078294a0
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