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 general appreciation in the following lines.

For centuries Newton's doctrine of the attraction of gravitation has been the most prominent example of a theory of natural science. Through the simplicity of its basic idea, an attraction between two bodies proportionate to their mass and also proportionate to the square of the distance; through the completeness with which it explained so many of the peculiarities in the movement of the bodies making up the solar system; and, finally, through its universal validity, even in the case of the far-distant planetary systems, it compelled the admiration of all.

But, while the skill of the mathematicians was devoted to making