THE PRIME EESULTANT 69 



ognized as our highest, authority on this particular mat- 

 ter: 



Mr. Sterner and I in our investigation of the theory of the 

 moon's motion, have probably occupied altogether about 8 or 9000 

 hours. There were about 13,000 multiplications of series made, 

 containing some 400,000 separate products ; the whole of the work 

 required the writing of between 4 and 5 million of digits and plus 

 and minus signs. Although the problem now completed con- 

 stitutes by far the longer part of the whole, much remains to be 

 done before it is advisable to proceed to the construction of the 

 tables. 



Here, then, is the practical solution of this vexed 

 problem (incidentally, also, of Mercury's perihelion an- 

 omaly), a solution that restores to us the law of the in- 

 verse square pure and undefiled. Now, I do not assert 

 that computers can hereafter discard the minute New- 

 combian decimal, of which I have previously spoken, and 

 get the correct answers notwithstanding. By no means ! 

 What I claim to do is to explain the origin and justify the 

 use of the decimal and, its significance being recognized, 

 to construct the science so as to conform. Kepler and 

 Newton were both wrong, and the astronomers of to-day 

 are wrong, in declaring that the planets revolve per prin- 

 cipium in conic sections; they revolve in conic spirals. 

 This, then, is what I had in mind when I asserted in the 

 Introduction that the minute decimal referred to could 

 be eliminated only by the complete overturning of the 

 Newtonian systeml 



If I am, in very truth, correct in the hypothesis that 

 the solar system is gyrating as the natural result of a 

 continuous struggle for equilibrium against the un- 

 settling suction of the Prime Resultant, then the follow- 

 ing conclusions follow as plain matters of course : 



1. That such equilibrium can be maintained only by 

 steady rotation of its members in the same direction. 



2. That circularity of orbits is the natural evolution 

 of this process. 



3. That the stablest form into which a body can be 

 fashioned is, gravitationally speaking, the flattest form; 



