MARIOTTE

mariotte, edme (c. 1620-1684), french physicist, spent most of his life at dijon, where he was prior of st martin sous beaune. he was one of the first members of the academy of sciences founded at paris in 1666. he died at paris on the 12th of may 1684. the first volume of the _histoire et memoires de l'academie_ (1733) contains many original papers by him upon a great variety of physical subjects, such as the motion of fluids, the nature of colour, the notes of the trumpet, the barometer, the fall of bodies, the recoil of guns, the freezing of water, &c. his _essais de physique_, four in number, of which the first three were published at paris between 1676 and 1679, are his most important works, and form, together with a _traite de la percussion des corps_, the first volume of the _oeuvres de mariotte_ (2 vols., leiden, 1717). the second of these essays (_de la nature de l'air_) contains the statement of the law that the volume of a gas varies inversely as the pressure, which, though very generally called by the name of mariotte, had been discovered in 1660 by robert boyle. the fourth essay is a systematic treatment of the nature of colour, with a description of many curious experiments and a discussion of the rainbow, halos, parhelia, diffraction, and the more purely physiological phenomena of colour. the discovery of the blind spot is noted in a short paper in the second volume of his collected works.