M. Raoul Pictet's Corpuscular Theory of Gravitation

Abstract

I BELIEVE that I can remove M. Pictet's uncertainties regarding the credibility of the presumptive origin of attractive force in the undirected motion of an all-pervading material ether, without adopting the desponding alternative to which he appears to be obliged (in perhaps needless extremities) to betake himself, that it might be conceded “without its being possible to explain it.” My reasons for accepting the proposition without any doubt or question, would at least, I believe, if they could be submitted to him in a form of faultless coherence and completeness, relieve him from pursuing the laborious purpose, which I am perfectly assured from my own apprehension of the real character of the equivalence, and of the mode of establishment which, it admits of, would fail in its intended object, of undertaking a series of pendulum experiments to prove it.