Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/326

312 Meanwhile, the Newtonian theory of attraction, under the skillful generalship of the geometers, went forth on its triumphal march through space, conquering great and small, far and near, until its empire became as universal as its name. The whirlpools of Descartes offered but a feeble resistance, and were finally dashed to pieces by the artillery of the parabolic comets; and the rubbish of this fanciful mechanism was cleaned out as completely as the cumbrous epicycles of Ptolemy had been dismantled by Copernicus and Kepler. The mathematicians certified that the solar system was protected against the inroads of comets, and the border warfare of one planet upon another, and that its stability was secure in the hands of gravitation, if only space should be kept open, and the dust and cobwebs which Newton had swept from the skies should not reappear. Prophetic eyes contemplated the possibility of an untimely end to the revolution of planets, if their ever-expanding atmospheres should rush in to fill the room vacated by the maelstroms of Descartes. When it was stated that the absence of infinite divisibility in matter, or the coldness of space, would place a limit upon expansion, and, at the worst, that the medium would be too attenuated to produce a sensible check in the headway of planets; and when, in more recent times, even Encke's comet showed but the slightest symptoms of mechanical decay, it was believed that the motion was, in a practical, if not in a mathematical sense, perpetual. Thus it was that the splendors of analysis dimmed the eyes of science to the intrinsic difficulties of Newton's theory, and familiarity with the language of attraction concealed the mystery that was lurking beneath it. A long experience in the treatment of gravitation had supplied mathematicians with a fund of methods and formulas suited to similar cases. As soon as electricity, magnetism, and electro-magnetism took form, they also were fitted out with a garment of attractive and repulsive forces acting at a distance; and the theories of Cavendish, Poisson, Aepinus, and Ampère, indorsed as they were by such names as Laplace, Plana, Liouville, and Green, met with general acceptance.

The seeds, which were destined to take root in a later generation, and disturb, if not dislodge, the prevalent interpretation of the force of gravitation, were sown by a contemporary of Newton. They found no congenial soil in which they could germinate and fructify until the early part of the present century. At the present moment, we find the luminiferous ether in quiet and undivided possession of the field from which the grosser material of ancient systems had been banished. The plenum, reigns everywhere; the vacuum is nowhere. Even the corpuscular theory of light, as it came from the hands of its founder, required the reënforcement of an ether. Electricity and magnetism, on a smaller scale, applied similar machinery. If there was a fundamental objection to the conception of forces acting at a distance, certainly the bridge was already built by which the difficulty could be