a ton or even tons, thousands of them coming into contact with our
earth's atmosphere every year, especially in August and November. All of
these small bodies have orbits among themselves, and gravitate round one
another, as they revolve round the sun. Now if the orbits of the
planetoids be such an entangled mass, what must be the orbits of these
meteors? What an indescribable, unimaginable mass of labyrinthian
motions must exist among these myriads of little bodies! How they must
intersect, cross and intermingle each other's orbits! What attraction
and counter-attraction they must exert upon each other! Let me ask any
man to sit down and try to imagine how the present recognized
Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces can account for the effectual working
of these meteors. As illustrating the necessity of a real and physical
Centrifugal Force which is to be the exact counterpart of the
Centripetal Force, I would call the attention of the reader to
Herschel's view of this matter. In dealing with the phenomena of comets'
tails he writes:[1] "Beyond a doubt, the widest and most interesting
prospect of future discovery, which this study holds out to us, is, that
distinction between gravitating and levitating matter, that positive and
irrefutable demonstration in nature of a repulsive force, co-extensive
with, but enormously more powerful than the attractive force we call
gravity which the phenomena of their tails afford." I premise that this
prophecy of Herschel's will be fully demonstrated and proved in the
succeeding pages of this work. For, in the theory of the Aether that is
to be afterwards perfected, it will be philosophically proved that the
physical medium so conceived will satisfactorily account for a force or
motion from the centre of all bodies; which motions fulfil all the
conditions required by that Centrifugal Force, which is the complement
and counterpart of the Attraction of Gravitation. At the present time,
with the conception of a frictionless Aether, it is impossible to
harmonize the existence of such a force or motion with our theory of the
Aether. Yet Professor Lebedew of Moscow, and Nichols and Hull of
America, have incontrovertibly demonstrated by actual experiments the
existence of such a force. Therefore it follows, that if our present
theory of the Aether fails to agree with experimental evidence, such a
theory must be reconstructed in order that our philosophy may be made to
agree with our experiments