304 J. Lovering—Mathematical and Philosophical 
Probably Rumford had never seen the paper of Le Sage, published 
by the Berlin Academy in 1782, in which he expounded hi 
mechanical theory of gravitation, to which he had devoted sixty- 
other being mutually screened from this bombardment. It was 
republished it. He has fitted it out in a fashionable dress, made 
out of elastic molecules instead of hard atoms, and has satisfied 
himself that it is consistent with modern thermo-dynamics and a 
perennial gravitation. 
us 
action at a distance a reality, or is gravitation to be explained, as 
we now believe magnetic and electric forces must be, by action of 
intervening matter? 
