Page:Experimental researches in chemistry and.djvu/467

452 balance as to act independent of the gravitating force. It has the like strict relation to force communicated by impact, pull, or in any other way. It enables a body to take up and conserve a given amount of force until that force is transferred to other bodies, or changed into an equivalent of some other form; that is all that we perceive in it: and we cannot find a more striking instance amongst natural or possible phenomena of the necessity of the conservation of force as a law of nature; or one more in contrast with the assumed variable condition of the gravitating force supposed to reside in the particles of matter.

Even gravity itself furnishes the strictest proof of the conservation of force in this, that its power is unchangeable for the same distance; and is by that in striking contrast with the variation which we assume in regard to the cause of gravity, to account for the results at different distances.

It will not be imagined for a moment that I am opposed to what may be called the law of gravitating action, that is, the law by which all the known effects of gravity are governed; what I am considering, is the definition of the force of gravitation. That the result of one exercise of a power may be inversely as the square of the distance, I believe and admit; and I know that it is so in the case of gravity, and has been verified to an extent that could hardly have been within the conception even of Newton himself when he gave utterance to the law: but that the totality of an inherent force can be employed according to that law I do not believe, either in relation to gravitation, or electricity, or magnetism, or any other supposed form of power.

I might have drawn reasons for urging a continual recollection of, and reference to, the principle of the conservation of force from other forms of power than that of gravitation; but I think that when founded on gravitating phenomena, they appear in their greatest simplicity; and precisely for this reason, that gravitation has not yet been connected by any degree of convertibility with the other forms of force. If I refer for a few minutes to these other forms, it is only to point in their variations, to the proofs of the value of the principle laid down, the consistency of the known phenomena with it, and the