He gives several important deductions which follow from this formula,
which is the analytical expression of the experimental result already
quoted as having been discovered subsequently by Dulong. Employing the
above expression for the latent heat of expansion, Carnot deduced a
general expression for the specific heat of a gas at constant volume
on the basis of the caloric theory. He showed that if the specific
heat was independent of the temperature (the hypothesis already
adopted by Laplace and Poisson) the function F't must be of the form