Lectures on clairmativeness, or, Human magnetism : with an appendix / by Gibson Smith.

  • Smith, Gibson
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on clairmativeness, or, Human magnetism : with an appendix / by Gibson Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    tural principles, for the centrifugal force of the planets; and hence it has been ascribed to the immediate power of the Supreme Being. But if it required this immediate power at first to give the planets their centrifu- gal force and motion round the sun, it requires also that this power should be constantly exercised, to prevent their being attracted into the sun. The centripetal power of the sun must be continually balanced by a centrifugal force of the planets, or, in time, the whole solar system would become wrecked and disorganized. Mr. Burritt, in his Geogra- phy of the Heavens, says :— Every planet moves in its orbit with a velocity varying every instant, in consequence of two forces ; one tending to the centre of the sun, and the other in the direction of a tangent to its orbit, arising from the primi- tive impulse given at the time it was launched into space. The former is called its centripetal, the latter, its centrifugal force. Should the centrifugal force cease, the planet would fall to the sun by its gravity ; were the sun not to attract it, it would fly off from its orbit in a straight line. By the time a planet has reached its aphelion, or that point of its orbit which is farthest from the sun, his attraction has overcome its velocity, and draws it towards him with such an accelerated motion, that it at last overcomes the sun's attraction, and shoots past him; then gradu- ally decreasing in velocity, it arrives at the perihelion, when the sun's at- traction again prevails. ; The above theory of the gravitation of the heavenly bodies is that now universally received by astronomers. They are agreed in ascribing the centrifugal force of the planets in the first instance to the Supreme Being, (and to him all worlds owe not only their motion, but origin,) but they have failed to point out to us those agents by which that force was first given. Motion is the result of certain fixed laws, established by the Deity. In seeking for those laws we are only approaching one step nearer to him who is the Author and Creator of all things. Now, astronomers have not only left us in the dark relative to the laws by which the Deity gave projectile force to the bodies that move in the regions of space, but they have, it seems to me, failed in many particulars to account for the gravitation of those bodies without a constant miracle every moment taking place,—or, in other words, without the constant exercise of infinite power. It is said that centrifugal force was given the planets when launched into the regions of space from the hands of the Supreme Being. Their attractive power was acquired at the same instant. The sun being the larger] body and the centre of the solar system, the tendency of the planets would be towards him ; but the centrifugal impetus, at first given them, so nicely counterbalances this attraction, that they can neither fly off nor rush together, but move around him in their present order and harmony. But if this were so, the distances of the planets from the sun, and from each other, would ever be invariably the same, and their motions would of necessity be uniform and regular. Suppose, for instance, the earth to have been ninety-five millions of miles from the sun when motion was first given it,—and suppose this distance to have been that point in space where the centrifugal and cen- tripetal forces were precisely adjusted and balanced ; the same distance would have been constantly maintained between them in the revolutions