Remarks on Sir Richard Phillips’s New Hypothesis. 37 
let us suppose a ball to be dropped from the top of a high tower; 
in this case the air’s resistance will retard the motion of the ball, 
instead of causing it to descend. 
Secondly. The rotation of the earth cannot possibly deflect 
the ball downwards, because that, if the ball were acted upon: 
by the rotary force only, it would fly off in the direction of a 
tangent to the earth’s surface; consequently the rotary motion’ 
of the earth would have an opposite effect to that ascribed to it 
by Sir Richard. 
Thirdly. That the annual motion of the earth cannot force the 
ball downward Sir Richard must know from the illustrations he has 
cited respecting the falling of bodies on board a ship in motion. 
And, as none of these forces taken singly has a tendency to 
move the ball towards the earth’s surface, it follows from the 
composition of motion that the joint action of these forces will 
not have any such tendency. 
As to the angle Sir Richard has drawn as the measure of the 
deflective force, he might have made it any thing or nothing— 
just as was most convenient ; consequently projectiles, if his 
reasoning be correct, would be subject to different laws in dif- 
ferent parts of the earth at the same time, and at the same place 
to different laws at different times: but I do not find that he’ 
has made any experimental researches on this subject. 
Sir Richard’s anxious desire to make his hypothesis agree with’ 
the known phenomena of falling bodies has led him into a trifling 
geometrical error. The spaces described by the points C and F 
(see his figure, Phil. Mag., No. 230, p. 436,) in the same time 
will be as the circumferences of the circles they move in; and the 
circumferences of circles are as their radii, and not as the squares - 
of their radii, as Sir Richard supposes. 
Sir Richard is also incorrect in supposing that the effect of 
the rotary motion of the earth on falling bodies has not been 
considered: it was one of the strongest objections that were 
made against the Copernican system,—that if a stone were let 
fall from the top of a high tower, it would strike the ground con- 
siderably to the westward of the foot of the tower. 
And as the experiments and reasonings of Galileo had not yet 
instructed men in the inertia of matter, nor in the composition 
of motion, the followers of Copernicus were unprovided with 
the true answer to this objection; viz. that the stone was a 
part of the earth, and therefore the annual and diurnal motions 
which were natural to the earth, were also natural to the stone; 
consequently the stone would retain the same motion with the 
tower, and strike the ground at the foot of it. 
A more accurate investigation of the subject has led others to 
conclude, that the stone would fall a little to the eastward of the 
C3 point 
