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Updated: June 16, 2025
They were opposed by the directors in Amsterdam, by their own governors and patroons, and by the errors which immemorial usage had ingrained in them as individuals. They overcame these forces, not by their own strength, nor by any violent act of revolution, but by the slow, irresistible energy of natural law, with which, as with a gravitative force, they had placed themselves in harmony.
We are now assured that there is something else in the universe which has no gravitative property at all, namely, the ether. It was first imagined in order to account for the phenomena of light, which was observed to take about eight minutes to come from the sun to the earth.
Its gravitative work is its best. It lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast. Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and deposit of sewage along the shore.
Under the influence of the gravitative attraction the materials of this realm of vapour inevitably tended to fall in toward the centre. If the process had been perfectly simple, the result would have been the formation of one vast mass, including all the matter which was in the original body.
To deduce the laws of the heavenly motions, we require not only to know the law of a rectilineal and that of a gravitative force, but the existence of both these forces in the celestial regions, and even their relative amount. We shall hereafter have occasion to return to this distinction, and to dwell on it at such a length as dispenses with the necessity of further insisting on it here.
It is well to close this very imperfect account of the learning which relates to the sun with a brief tabular statement showing the relative masses of the several bodies of the solar system. It should be understood that by mass is meant not the bulk of the object, but the actual amount of matter in it as determined by the gravitative attraction which it exercises on other celestial bodies.
If the surface of the earth were uniformly covered with water to the depth of ten thousand feet or more, every particle of fluid would, in a measure, obey the attraction of the sun, of the moon, and, theoretically, also of all the other bodies in space, on the principle that every particle of matter in the universe exercises a gravitative effect on every other.
The new sphere would, of course, pull upon the others in the measure of its gravitative value i.e., its weight. The centre of gravity of the system would now be determined not by two distinct bodies, but by three.
Then only will its gravitative force be sufficient to cause incoming matter to fall upon it with so powerful an impact as to produce intense heat. Further, the compressive force of a small planet will be a less effective heat-producing agency than in the case of a larger one.
Where the relief is not brought about by these tumbles of snow, another mode of gravitative action accomplishes the result, though in a more roundabout way, through the mechanism of glaciers. We have already noted the fact that the winter's snow upon our hillsides undergoes a movement in the direction of the slope.
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