Page:On the various forces of nature and their relations to each other.djvu/44

40 I cannot take a better illustration of this than that of gold leaf, because it brings before us the reason of this apparent difference in the time of the fall. Here is a piece of gold-leaf. Now, if I take a lump of gold and this gold-leaf, and let them fall through the air together, you see that the lump of gold—the sovereign, or coin—will fall much faster than the gold leaf. But why? They are both gold, whether sovereign or gold-leaf. Why should they not fall to the earth with the same quickness? They would do so, but that the air around our globe interferes very much where we have the piece of gold so extended and enlarged as to offer much obstruction on falling through it. I will, however, shew you that gold-leaf does fall as fast when the resistance of the air is excluded—for if I take a piece of gold-leaf and hang it in the centre of a bottle, so that the gold, and the bottle, and the air within shall all have an equal chance of falling, then the gold-leaf will fall as fast as anything else. And if I suspend the bottle containing the gold-leaf to a string, and set it oscillating like a pendulum, I may make it