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 more exact calculations of the consequences to which it led, no real progress was made in the science of gravitation. It is true that the inquiry was transferred to the field of physics, following Cavendish's success in demonstrating the common attraction between bodies with which laboratory work can be done, but it always was evident that natural philosophy had no grip on the universal power of attraction. While in electric effects an influence exercised by the matter placed between bodies was speedily observed — the starting-point of a new and fertile doctrine of electricity — in the case of gravitation not a trace of an influence exercised by intermediate matter could ever be discovered. It was, and remained, inaccessible and