ed with each other for supremacy
for so many years. Thus it will be shown that the philosophers like
Kepler, Descartes, and Huyghens, the former of whom has stamped his name
on the three laws that bear his name to-day, and the latter who gave us
the inception of the very theory that overthrew Newton's theory of
light, had after all a more or less true philosophic conception of the
physical mechanism of the solar system and of the universe at large.

ART. 94. _Relative Motion of Aether and Matter._--There is hardly any
subject of greater importance which is engaging the attention of
scientists at the present time, than the question as to what is the
relative motion of Matter to the Aether in which it moves.

I venture to premise the successful solution of the problem will be
accompanied with the greatest advance to science that has been known for
a long time. The problem to be solved may be stated thus: "Does the
Aether surrounding a planet or sun or any body in space move with that
body, or does it allow the body to pass through it?"

Up to the present, opinions on the subject have been varied and
conflicting. Some scientists hold that the planetary and other bodies in
space pass through the Aether without disturbing it, while others hold
that part of the Aether is carried along by the moving planet. Fresnel
assumed that the surrounding Aether was carried along by the earth, so
that all relative phenomena would be the same as if the earth were at
rest. Fizeau, from experiments which he conducted on running water, also
came to the same conclusion.

With the old idea of a frictionless medium, some of the present accepted
theories are altogether untenable, because, if Aether is frictionless,
how can it be carried along with the moving body, unless it is held
bound to that body? and how can it be held bound to that body if it is
frictionless?

The whole view of the Aether is, however, changed by the conception of
the Aether put forward in Chapter IV. Aether is Matter, and being matter
it is also gravitative, and therefore is just as much subject to the Law
of Gravitation as any other kind of matter, as Young stated in his
Fourth Hypothesis (Art. 45).

We will therefore attack the problem of the relative motion of the earth
and the Aether around it from this new standpoint. In order to be
strictly philosophical, we must base our hypothesis and conception on
experience and observation. Where in the whole of planetary