ABSTRACT
In 1858, James Patrick Muirhead rehearsed once again the arguments at the heart of the controversy but also ventured a history of the controversy itself. Thus was Henry Brougham launched on the work that became the focus of a second period of intense controversy in 1845—1846, and that ultimately precipitated the publication of the James Watt correspondence on the composition of water. In 1848, C. R. Weld's History of the Royal Society was published, the second volume of which contained an account of the water controversy. Muirhead had believed in 1848 that the controversy was effectively over. Arago's main public response, however, came on the occasion of the presentation of a copy of Muirhead's translation of the Eloge to the Academie des Sciences. William Vernon Harcourt's rejoinder to Arago's Eloge of Watt came so quickly that many people would have learned of the one from the other.
