380 
ellipse at the comparatively slow rate of about 2,000 miles an 
hour, instead of with a velocity of upwards of 65,000, as it flies 
along with the earth, describing a wave line upon its orbit. 
3. Allow me only further to premise that some of the scientific 
critics of the press have professed to join issue with me upon 
this subject. Mr. Augustus De Morgan, late Professor of 
Mathematics in University College, London, in the Athenoeum, 
has magnanimously misrepresented and attempted to ridicule 
me more than once. Mr. Balfour Stewart, anonymously, in 
the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal (which shortly afterwards 
became defunct), was quite as successful in misrepresenting 
me, and nearly as facetious, as Professor De Morgan himself. 
While in the late journal, The Parthenon , when edited by Mr. 
C. W. Goodwin, the author of the essay on “ The Mosaic Cos- 
mogony” in Essays and Reviews, there is a kind of acknow- 
ledgment that my objections to Newton's demonstrations were 
valid ; for it is mildly observed that “ there appears to be a 
class of writers who imagine that, if they can point out a 
difficulty in Newton's demonstrations, they have struck a heavy 
blow at universal gravitation.'' To which I replied, in my 
Cambridge Paper, “ that it must depend upon the nature of 
the difficulties, and the demonstrations in which they are 
found, whether they deal a fatal blow to the theory or not ; 
and that the proper course surely is manfully to face admitted 
difficulties, and clear them away, if possible, by showing that 
they do not, if they do not , affect demonstrations essential to 
the theory.'' * But the writer in The Parthenon almost depre- 
cated such inquiry as unnecessary, and somewhat pathetically 
observed, that, “whatever uncertainty there maybe with regard 
to some other sciences, we are usually taught to believe that 
the mechanics of the heavens are not uncertain.” f We know, 
too, how implicitly Mr. Goodwin believed in the certainty of 
the nebular theory of the famous author of the Mecanique 
Celeste, with all its ^msi-mathematical demonstrations, and 
how utterly the theory has perished. Strangely enough, a 
reverend Professor, who gave himself out as an adherent of 
that evaporated theory in the Replies to Essays and Reviews, 
wrote to one of the foundation members of this Institute, and 
made it a kind of objection to his not joining it, that the 
Honorary Secretary “ actually did not believe in the theory of 
universal gravitation” ! One of the smart writers, also, in the 
Saturday Review (which professes to be a “journal of science,” 
though it has long since ceased to give anything like scientific 
articles), in noticing this Society's proceedings, has had his 
little joke about the author of Vis Inertice Vida. And I notice 
# Mech. of the Heavens , § 24. + Ibid., § 16. 
