Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/329

Rh it or through it. According to their view, action at a distance is the force, and it admits of no other illustration, explanation, or analysis. It is not surprising that Faraday and others, who had lost their faith in action at short distances, should have been completely staggered by the ordinary interpretation of the law of gravitation, and that they declared the clause which asserted that the force diminished with the square of the distance to be a violation of the principle of the conservation of force.

Must we, then, content ourselves with the naked facts of gravitation, as Comte did, or is it possible to resolve them into a mode of action, in harmony with our general experience, and which does not shock our conceptions of matter and force? In 1798, Count Rumford wrote thus: "Nobody surely, in his sober senses, has ever pretended to understand the mechanism of gravitation." Probably Rumford had never seen the paper of Le Sage, published by the Berlin Academy in 1782, in which he expounded his mechanical theory of gravitation, to which he had devoted sixty-three years of his life. In a posthumous work, printed in 1818, Le Sage has developed his views more fully. He supposed that bodies were pressed toward one another by the everlasting pelting of ultra-mundane atoms, inward bound from the immensity of space beyond, the faces of the bodies which looked toward each other being mutually screened from this bombardment. It was objected to this hypothesis, which introduced Lucretius into the society of Newton and his followers, that the collision of atoms with atoms, and with planets, would cause a secular diminution in the force of gravity. Le Sage admitted the fact. But, as no one knew that the solar system was eternal, the objection was not fatal. As the necessity for giving a mechanical account of gravitation was not generally felt at the time, the theory of Le Sage fell into oblivion. In 1873, Sir William Thomson resuscitated and republished it. He has fitted it out in a fashionable dress, made out of elastic molecules instead of hard atoms, and has satisfied himself that it is consistent with modern thermo-dynamics and a perennial gravitation.

Let us now look in a wholly different quarter for the mechanical origin of gravitation. In 1870 Prof. Guthrie gave an account of a novel experiment, viz., the attraction of a light body by a tuning fork when it was set in vibration. Thomson repeated the experiment upon a suspended egg-shell, and attracted it by a simple wave of the hand. Thomson remarks that "what gave the great charm to these investigations, for Mr. Guthrie himself, and no doubt also for many of those who heard his expositions and saw his experiments, was, that the results belong to a class of phenomena to which we may hopefully look for discovering the mechanism of magnetic force, and possibly also the mechanism by which the forces of electricity and gravity are transmitted." By a delicate mathematical analysis, Thomson arrives at the theorem that the "average pressure at any point of an