William Bower Taylor

“ A mass moving in free space in any direction excepting directly toward a similar mass, must receive a more active shower of corpuscles in its front than in its rear, and must thus be retarded by a differential of energy directly proportioned to its velocity. Every planet must accordingly encounter a tangential resistance to its orbital motion, proportional to its own gravitation and to its velocity. ”

“ On the other hand, two bodies ought to advance toward each other, since they would form a mutual screen, as their opposed surfaces would no longer be hit in the direction of the line joining them by the ultramundane corpuscles, and there would then exist currents, the effect of which would no longer be neutralized by opposite currents. Moreover, it will be readily seen that two bodies plunged into such ' gravitation fluid ' would tend to approach each other with a force varying inversely as the square of the distance. ”

“ The author supposed that he had covered the ground by the assumption that material atoms are so exceeding small in comparison with their interspaces that but few of the flying " corpuscles" will encounter the atoms. Professor Tait, of the University of Edinburgh, has remarked : " It is necessary also to suppose that particles and masses of matter have a cage-like form, so that enormously more corpuscles pass through them than impinge upon them ; else the gravitation action between two bodies would not be as the product of their masses." ”

“ Not only does the "gravific fluid" utterly fail to give an approximate representation of the actual conditions of the planetary movements, but as must be evident, it will not permit the continued existence of any such movements. ”

“ By means of an infinite number of "ultramundane corpuscles" of transcendent minuteness and velocity, traversing space in straight lines in all directions, atoms and masses of matter are impelled together differentially in the lines of their reciprocal mechanical shadows, or in the direction in which the rectilinear impulses of the " corpuscles" are uncounteracted by opposing ones, from the intervention of other atoms or masses. ”

“ This notion involves a prodigious quantity of material in the shape of flying atoms, where we perceive no gross matter, but very little material in solid bodies, where we do find gross matter ; and it further requires that the accumulation of atoms which strike the solid bodies perpetually should be insensible. ”

“ Hence the rate at which the energy of the corpuscles is spent in order to maintain the gravitating property of a single pound is at least millions of millions of foot-pounds per second. What becomes of this enormous quantity of energy ? ”