A System of Mechanical Philosophy

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OF CORPUSCULAR FORCES IN GENERAL. 197. We have explained in sufficient detail, the chief phenomena which result from the heaviness of bodies in motion. The exquisite agreement between the legitimate deduction from the premised principles of dynamics with these phenomena, has had the double effect of giving...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OF CORPUSCULAR FORCES IN GENERAL. 197. We have explained in sufficient detail, the chief phenomena which result from the heaviness of bodies in motion. The exquisite agreement between the legitimate deduction from the premised principles of dynamics with these phenomena, has had the double effect of giving us the grounds of a complete confidence in the truth of those principles, and in their competency to the explanation of the appearancesjDf nature. The effects of the heaviness or gravity of bodies' will be found to mix with those of every other property, which observation shall shew us to be found in all matter, and therefore we must carefully separate the effects of gravity from the other circumstances of the complicated phenomenon, before we presume to make any inference in support of the existence and the nature of any other property which we may suppose the subject to possess. Proceeding according to the method proposed, we must now consider the phenomena which indicate a mechanical property of existing matter, that seems next, in respect of its generality or extent, to gravity. 198. Motion is continued or preserved in bodies by the perseverance or inertia of matter. It is necessarily communicated to other bodies by this sensible impenetrability. It is modified by the action of gravity, so as to produce all the variety of mechanical changes that we observe. But this conservation, communication, and modification of motion, are susceptible of infinite varieties by circumstances which seem to characterise different classes of bodies, and make them appear of very different natures. A piece of glass lies still on a table, or slides down an inclined plane. It sinks, if laid on the surface of water?it rises to the surface, if plunged into quicksilver?it makes a pit, if...