268 AGGREGATE FORCES 



But if caloric be the physical cause of cohesion, 

 capillary attraction, and chemical solution, as I 

 have demonstrated ; and if gravitation result 

 from the aggregate action of atoms, as main- 

 tained by Newton, Laplace, and many other 

 philosophers, the annual and diurnal movements 

 of the heavenly bodies must be owing to a mo- 

 dified action of the same cause.f 



We are so accustomed to the great powers and 

 movements which mark the course of nature, 

 that we are scarcely aware of their existence 

 until aroused by some extraordinary pheno- 

 menon. What can be more obvious and familiar 

 than the power of heat in modifying the surface 

 of our planet ? a power absolutely incommensu- 

 rable, though for the most part unobserved. Were 

 it possible to compute the aggregate forces of 

 capillary attraction in the circulation of the 



f According to all the best established canons of philoso- 

 phizing, that is the most important principle in physics, to which 

 the greatest number of phenomena may be traced. But if we 

 admit that the accelerated motion of falling bodies, the aggre- 

 gation of planets, with their annual and diurnal revolutions, are 

 resolvable into the Newtonian law of gravity, it is certain that 

 many other equally important phenomena of nature cannot be 

 referred to the principle of gravitation, such as those of heat, 

 light, and electricity, together with the innumerable operations of 

 Chemistry, Geology, and Meteorology, all of which are immedi- 

 ately connected with, and may be traced to that law of caloric by 

 which it produces the opposite effects of contraction and expan- 

 sion, and without which, we cannot explain the most simple mo- 

 difications of molecular attraction. 



