Force and nature : attraction and repulsion : the radical principles of energy, discussed in their relations to physical and morphological developments / by Charles Frederick Winslow.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Force and nature : attraction and repulsion : the radical principles of energy, discussed in their relations to physical and morphological developments / by Charles Frederick Winslow. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Brahe (1546), Galileo (1564), and Kepler (1571) opened still more widely and conspicuously the wonders of this vast arcanum. Another centennial ushered in Newton (1642) and Leibnitz (1646), who may be said to have vanquished the powers of the sun and stars, insomuch that by the appli- cation of numbers to the magnitudes, distances, and orbits of bodies already discovered, a method of knowledge and inves- tigation not possessed by former astronomers, they adjusted the balances of the universe, established the numerical functions of planetary attraction, and weighed the sun, moon, and planets, as a merchant weighs feathers or iron with his steelyards. And now, a century later, appeared Laplace, another profound explorer of the universe, who, struck with the uniformity of many astronomical phenomena, conceived and propounded the idea that the solar system in preplanetary periods had existed in nebulous condi- tions as a vast volume of molecrdar dust and vapour, and that from this form of matter, set into revolving motion from west to east by some unknown cause, had at last been evolved, by successive coolings and condensations, comets, planets, moons, asteroids, aerolites, and, ultimately, the sun. The almost uniform westerly-eastern motion pursued by all these bodies upon their respective axes and arouud each other, was asserted to be conclusive proof of this doctrine. The conception of so vast and simple a scheme of creation was indeed grand, and worthy to be ranked with that most ingenious postulate of Newton from which had been elabo- rated the universal law of gravitation. So, astronomical knowledge has been developed by successive intellectual movements of a centennial character, each step dependent upon the preceding, and each leading to clearer insight into the profoundest secrets of nature. The projectile impulse assumed by Newton, and so necessary to play one of the important parts in his theory of celestial mechanics, was thus supplanted by a new theory of centri- fugal motion—a theory purely mechanical also, like the Newtonian conception, but differing in so far that a media-