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Hair is a sign of strength, so say the wise,

'Twas so with Sampson! hence when question'd, where I deem the mystic power of God's head lies?

I certainly shall answer-in the air.

A bearded God! a whisker'd Deity!

Sublime! but with this wish I must give o'er,

Long be his beard, as his longevity,

And be his whiskers hallow'd ever more.-I. W. IMRAY.

To the Editor of "The Lion."

SIR,-I send you a printed paper, which I have at the same time addressed to every journalist in the United Kingdom, for if the extended press is of the use that is pretended, truth and knowledge ought in their progress not to suffer the obstacles which they experienced before the invention of printing.

It is however one thing to print, and another to be read, and even when read, to be understood. This last contingency in some degree neutralizes the advantages of the printing press. How else does it happen that your ingenious correspondent, CANDID, who has so ably analyzed Newton's Theory of the Tides, should continue to taunt me with questions, which in the plainest language are answered in my paper on muscular motion?

When a man at rest moves, or when not in exertion he begins to exert himself, a full drawn inspiration of air, shows the source of his power. His full and rapid inspirations while the exertion continues, prove the same, and his simultaneous evaporations, prove what is mechanically passing in his body, as consequences of those inspirations. He lives within an excited world of atoms, and by his inspirations he transfers their excitements to his system. We need be at no loss for the source of these atomic excitements, when we know that the whole planet is moving sixty times faster than a cannon ball, and that although the visible atmospheric formations are subservient to these motions, yet the motions are not lost in the invisible mass.

If, however, your correspondent enquires further, why a man obeys a motive for rising from his seat and walking? I refer him to animal education, habit, and experience-I refer him to an infant WITHOUT THESE. It is the intervention of long experience, and trials and habits, stimulated by animal wants, that a man performs that which an infant cannot perform. It is this education which enables some men to play forty-eight notes in a bar of music, while the untaught man cannot play one. We learn the use of our muscles, we learn, through the nerves, to direct them; the nerves derive their proximate excitements through the senses, and their general powers from respiration; the brain in all animals treasures experience; we direct our muscular levers against the chair and the ground, we rise from the chair, and continuing our muscular actions against the fulcrum of the ground, we walk about, keeping up our stock of nervous irritability, by continued inspirations of air.

Your correspondent is in error if he imagines that I shrink from any enquiry on an ordinary subject. I merely desire to limit discussion to one thing at a time, and if I am speaking about a house, not to be led from my object by a digression about the globe on which the house stands. It would be out of place, while one was describing the movements of a watch, to be led astray by a discussion about the powers and nature of springs.

While, however, I compliment your correspondent on some of his observations abont tides, I feel it proper to protest against his use of the word attraction in reference to insensate matter. I really thought I had exterminated the very idea of such a power in genus and species, except among the veriest bigots of the magical and witchcraft schools. The tides are effects of the earth's motions, and of the actions and reactions of the moon. The two bodies revolve round a real or virtual centre of their momenta. It would be real, and produce change of place in the earth, but the mobile waters render it virtual as to the solid parts, and perform the office of a balance-wheel. In my Four Dialogues, I have treated the subject fully, and in my Twelve Essays, in detail with some diagrams.

I mean no offence to CANDID, and others like him, but it ought not to be dissembled, that they have every thing to unlearn, for, on this subject of NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, the entire chain of reasoning has been erroneous, and we have in the last 200 years, added nothing to our wisdom but a mass of unconnected facts, with few or no rational inductions.

Hyde-park-row,
June 27, 1828.

R. PHILLIPS.

AN APPEAL TO THE COMMON SENSE OF THE

COMMUNITY.

-To the Editor, &c.

SIR,-Before I am allowed to appeal to THE COMMON SENSE of your readers, I must first appeal to your public spirit and love of truth on subjects of every degree of interest, to allow my appeal to appear in your columns. I hope also that you will not consider truth, in its relation to THE STUDY OF NATURE, as beneath your notice; for although these subjects are less interesting to many than the records of political occurrences, yet the printing press has carried the spirit of philosophy into every vil lage, and has every where created some strong-headed votaries, whose pursuits are entitled to respect.

My appeal is TO THE COMMON SENSE of these inquisitive persons, for on this subject nothing short of Universal Suffrage can rescue natural philosophy from those trammels of superstition and admitted authority which have governed these studies from the age of magic and witchcraft, and which could not be wholly shaken off at the dawn of knowledge, when the foundations were laid of existing systems. In those times no one thought it necessary to enquire into the reasonable connection of cause and effect; but it was usual to assign gratuitous and miraculous causes for every phenomenon. Of this description were the universally-believed powers of witchcraft, prognostication, charms, magic, suction, transformation, enchantment, transmutation, &c. &c., long since exploded; and such too were attraction, repulsion, universal gravitation, matter of heat, travelling atoms of light, repelling and attracting fluids, &c. &c., which are not yet exploded, but are to this day taught in all Universities, and ostentatiously set forth in all Books.

Now, Sir, no social power, but a spirited exertion of the unsophisticated COMMON SENSE of the community, can rescue nature and science from these absurdities. Reform cannot proceed from the professors, of such dogmas, for, without moral obliquity, teachers are obliged to confine their instructions to whatever time has sanctioned; and editors of books dare not hazard the cost of publication, except in the support of received and palatable doctrines. What will please, or what will sell, is the unavoidable guide of those who purpose to live by lecturing or print

ing; and if it happens that truth and profit coincide, they doubtless have more satisfaction in doing their duty; but if not, then the balance of motives inclines to present interest, rather than to sacrifices in behalf of remote contingencies about abstract truth. Education in prejudices, more. over, begets obstinate adherents of error, for it is far more difficult to unlearn than to learn.

I need not remind your readers of the constant recurrence of the term ATTRACTION in all books; and they must be aware that this fantastic idea is gravely taught as a property of all matter! Did they ever ask themselves how attraction is performed? If they reflect for a moment, they will perceive that it requires that two insensate bodies should go towards each other with motions in contrary directions; the force, to produce each of which motions, must proceed from the opposite side of each body, though at that side the other body is not present! In a word, it requires bodies to act where they are not; and no absurdity of magic, enchantment, or witchcraft, could be greater than this. The power of attraction is therefore disgraceful to those who teach it, and also to the age which tolerates If bodies go together without apparent cause, common sense tells us that there must nevertheless be a competent mechanical cause; and the pride of wisdom ought to stimulate us with zeal to discover the true cause, and not to veil our ignorance or our indolence by using a term which was derived from the schools of magic, and which, considered as a property of matter, or as the indiscriminating name of an effect, leads to all kinds of incongruities and false analogies.

its use.

I forbear, from respect to the understanding of your readers, to notice one whimsical hypothesis, that bodies draw or pull one another; because as there are no ropes, it is evidently a false analogy. But universally every motion is in the direction of the force impressed, and in this case, as there are no ropes, so the force must proceed from the opposite side of each of the bodies mutually going together.

REPULSION, another of these properties of matter, was derived from the same ignominious source, and is equally absurd: for it supposes that insensate bodies are pushing one another in a direction contrary to the direction in which each is moving! In one case they are supposed to have a liking for each other, and in the other a dislike! Yet these are the powers with which our pseudo-philosophers explain all kinds of phenomena, and we see them set forth in every page of every book, and hear them flippantly quoted in every sentence of a philosophical lecturer!

UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION is another of the mysteries of the same irrational school. A body falls to the earth by some force. A philosopher did not stop to enquire how this force was derived; whether it was local or not; but on this solitary fact he launched an unknown power into the heavens, and there fitted it to all phenomena! It appears, however, that it' is merely the local and terrestrial effect of a local and terrestrial causethe necessary consequence of the simultaneous twofold motions of the earth; and therefore has not more connexion with the universe, than the motions of a stage-coach in passing through a parish has with the parish. The parts of the mass, owing to the rotation, are in relative motions, which, as to the parts, abate the force of the absolute motion. But the centre is not rotated, and thus retaining all its absolute motion, it carries with it all the parts in relative motion, and in consequence they move towards the centre. Then again: as a sphere so moved and balanced has two sides moving different ways, bodies at antipodes act on each other through their centre or fulcrum with forces equal to their contrary velocities. The absolute motion carries the entire mass 98100 feet in a second. The other is an included local motion of rotation, equal to 1524 feet in a

second, and merely acts relatively on the parts, and in the four quadrants generates a relative momentum of four times 1524, or 6096. If, then, 98100 be divided by 6096, we have 16 feet and an inch for the velocity with which every unsustained part is driven, as the product of the two motions to the Centre! By these known quantities within our reach, we thus easily determine the true distance of the sun, for 16.1 X 4 X 1524 gives 98146 feet, or 18 miles, for the orbicular motion per second, and this gives 93 millions to a fraction for the sun's distance, and accords with the mean of all the determinations by the parallax. I call this an experimentum crucis, and it defies all cavil or objection. For general satisfaction, however, I have printed separately a popular demonstration of this fundamental theorem, and it may be had of the Booksellers; but every operative mechanic will furnish his own ready demonstration.

The high-sounding words, attraction of gravitation, are Anglo-Latin for the well understood word Weight; but the dust of mystified phraseology was necessary to reconcile the abuse that was made of this relative terrestrial force. But as universal weight would have made every thing tumble together, the climax of the whole was the invention of a PROJECTILE FORCE, and finally the introduction of THE OMNISCIENT as a party in this jumble of contradictory powers. Such philosophy might very well be invented by a young man at Cambridge in the same year that some witches were burnt by Sir Matthew Hale at Bury; but the philosophy of that year ought not to have survived the laws for burning witches! Its principles accorded however with those which led to faith in witchcraft and hence its rapid introduction; for be it known, the victims at Bury were not convicted on vulgar prejudice, but on the concurrent testimony of some of the most enlightened men of the time, by which alone the scruples of the judge were removed. Ought then such an age to be for after ages, an authority which is not to be questioned, and ought we not rather to examine with suspicion doctrines emanating from an epoch, when astronomers were astrologers, when chemists were alchemists, when the patrons of all superstitions, Digby, Ashmole, and Aubrey, were leaders of the Royal Society, and when the King cured 1000 per annum of scrofula by the royal touch, of which fact his majesty's chief physician, oddly named Wiseman, published authorized reports!

I am aware that many persons will quote the geometrical demonstrations of Newton, but this is a false alliance. Geometry demonstrates nothing about principles, and all its proofs are limited to abstract number and quantity. The principles are arbitrarily allied to number and quantity, but demonstrations about these have no connexion with the principles, which may be true or may be false, in spite of their association with diagrams. It happens that there does exist a law of radiating force, which by action and re-action produces the phenomena of the solar system, but it has no connexion with this force of weight; it is a diffusive force of radiated motion from the sun, not a force directed towards the centre, and therefore requires no projectile force, nor vacuum in space. The force of weight is one of subordinate production, while the force which moves the planets is another, and totally different in its mode of action. Newton assimilated these, and his first error begat the series which runs through his system, and vitiates all the inferences deduced from his transcendant geometry and ingenious analysis. He even considered gravitation or local weight as paramount to every thing, and tells us that its purpose is to keep up the quantity of motion in the universe; thereby making a subordinate effect of motion the cause of all causes, yet subservient to a law, and re quiring the aid of a projectile force, a vacuum, &c. &c.!

No. 2.-VOL. 2.

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Attracting and repelling fluids, as electricity, &c. are of course as absurd as their pretended properties. The matter of heat, sometimes repulsive, sometimes attractive, and sometimes latent, is another fancy of But how great the magical school, which violates all common sense. must be that faith which believes that such atoms as those of light travel through all obstructions twelve millions of miles in a minute! Yet these are the current assertions of modern natural philosophy, and they are repeated, and re-echoed, till they are perhaps believed. The materials of all these agents are of course everywhere present and perhaps are common to all; but the peculiar effects arise only from peculiar excitements. Action and separation produce that force and phenomenon of restoration which we call electrical; but there is and can be no fluid. Excitements of motion produce the phenomena of atomic dispersion called Heat, but it is the notion alone which causes the heat, not any property of the matter. Further excitements convert the force of heat into Light or vehement propulsions of the atoms which fill space; and these radiated propulsions of atom to atom constitute all the phenomena of light. When moved in vibration, it is sound; and atoms of light do not travel more than those of sound. It is only the effect that radiates, not the matter or the identical atoms first affected.

With regard to the cause of ATTRACTION and REPULSION, there are as many as there are kinds. Sometimes it is the intercepted pressure of the elastic atmosphere; often the direct pressure itself, as in crystallization: frequently the union and re-action of the atmospheres of bodies; at others a display of the force of separation or reunion of elementary gases; sometimes the effect of the extreme subdivision of matter and the union of fitting forms; and occasionally it is the action of relative motions within absolute ones, which carry forward the centre. In every case the examination of the true cause unfolds some curious and wonderful economy of nature: but to sink all these inquiries, and overlook the wonders of the world in such absurd terms as ATTRACTION and REPULSION, is to caricature Nature, degrade the human understanding, and render the pretensions of knowledge ridiculous.

There may be much to learn, but this and the next generation will not be wiser, if we do not forthwith begin to unlearn; and do not seek the temple of wisdom by the true road, in the study of the phenomena of matter, as produced by transfers, accidents and radiations of Motion. In this last will be traced that law of diffused force which governs the planetary bodies, and which was erroneously supposed to be the diffusion of the local relative force which consolidates planetary masses.

To create proper doubts, to excite enquiry and discussion, and to give a fair chance to truth, I therefore make an appeal through the printing press to all clear-headed men and honest inquirers after wisdom; and if they would condescend to apply their energies to these subjects, we may then hope that the rubbish of the dark ages may be removed from our studies before the year 1900, but without such aid it will obstruct the march of knowledge at least till the distant year 2000. Hyde Park Row, London,

June 30, 1828.

RICHARD PHILLIPS.

I shall not be backward in answering all relevant observations; but as on these subjects I have no exclusive personal interest, I hope that direct communications will be transmitted FREE OF POSTAGE. I have and can have no object but the promulgation of truth, for it is only in the paths of truth that man can make important or really useful discoveries, while the paths of error lead only to confusion.

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