William Bower Taylor

“ This central mass agitated with intestine motions of extreme violence in all directions, as in a boiling caldron, produces an intense light and heat, while detached particles at the surface, continually more and more broken up by the frequency and impetuosity of their collisions, acquire a subtilty transcending all conception of the imagination, and are finally thrown off in all directions with explosive force to immense distances, and with the velocity known as that of radiant light. ”

“ The gravitation of the planets toward the center of the sun, and the weight of bodies toward the center of the earth, are not caused either by the attraction of Newton, or by the rotary force of the vortex medium of Descartes, but by the immediate impulsion of a substance which under the form of what I call a ' central torrent,' is continually thrown from the whole circumference of the vortex to its center, and consequently impresses on all bodies encountered by it in its path the same tendency toward the center of the vortex. ”

“ As the inter-vortical molecules acquire different magnitudes before [216] being finally driven toward the center of any system, they will also have differing rates of descent, "their velocities being inversely as their masses, so that if one should become a thousand times larger and slower than the impelling particle of light, it would still have a velocity equal to the diameter of the earth in one minute;" and the average speed would be much greater than this, though always much less than the velocity of light. ”