When, in 1829, André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) was called upon to prepare a course in theoretical and experimental physics for the Collège de France, he first set about determining the limits of the field of physics. This exercise suggested to his wide-ranging intellect not only the definition of physics but the classification of all human knowledge. He prepared his scheme of classification, tried it out on his physics students, found it incomplete, returned to his study, and produced finally a two-volume work wherein the province of kinematics was first marked out for all to see and consider.[56] Only a few lines could be devoted to so specialized a branch as kinematics, but Ampère managed to capture the central idea of the subject. [Footnote 56: André-Marie Ampère, _Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, une exposition analytique d'une classification naturelle de toutes les connaissances humaines_, 2 vols., Paris, 1838 (for origin of the project, see vol. 1, pp. v, xv).] Cinématique (from the Greek word for movement) was, according to Ampère, the science "in which movements are considered in themselves [independent of the forces which produce them], as we observe them in solid bodies all about us, and especially in the assemblages called machines."[57] Kinematics, as the study soon came to be known in English,[58] was one of the two branches of elementary mechanics, the other being statics. [Footnote 57: _Ibid._, vol. 1, pp. 51-52.] [Footnote 58: Willis (_op. cit._ footnote 21) adopted the word "kinematics," and this Anglicization subsequently became the standard term for this branch of mechanics.] In his definition of kinematics, Ampère stated what the faculty of mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris, had been groping toward since the school's opening some 40 years earlier. The study of mechanisms as an intellectual discipline most certainly had its origin on the left bank of the Seine, in this school spawned, as suggested by one French historian,[59] by the great _Encyclopédie_ of Diderot and d'Alembert. [Footnote 59: G. Pinet, _Histoire de l'Ecole Polytechnique_, Paris, 1887, pp. viii-ix. In their forthcoming book on kinematic synthesis, R. S. Hartenberg and J. Denavit will trace the germinal ideas of Jacob Leupold and Leonhard Euler of the 18th century.]