It is also necessary in connection with the question under reply that
"An English F.T.S." should know that the "Adepts" of the Good Law reject
gravity as at present explained. They deny that the so-called "impact
theory" is the only one that is tenable in the gravitation hypothesis.
They say, that if all efforts made by the physicists to connect it with
ether, in order to explain electric and magnetic distance-action have
hitherto proved complete failures, it is again due to the race ignorance
of the ultimate states of matter in Nature, and, foremost of all, of the
real nature of the solar stuff. Believing but in the law of mutual
magneto-electric attraction and repulsion, they agree with those who
have come to the conclusion that "Universal gravitation is a weak
force," utterly incapable of accounting for even one small portion of
the phenomena of motion. In the same connection they are forced to
suggest that science may he wrong in her indiscriminate postulation of
centrifugal force, which is neither a universal nor a consistent law.
To cite but one instance this force is powerless to account for the
spheroidal oblateness of certain planets. For if the bulge of planetary
equators and the shortening of their polar axes is to be attributed to
centrifugal force, instead of being simply the result of the powerful
influence of solar electro-magnetic attraction, "balanced by concentric
rectification of each planet's own gravitation achieved by rotation on
its axis," to use an astronomer's phraseology (neither very clear nor
correct, yet serving our purpose to show the many flaws in the system),
why should there be such difficulty in answering the objection that the
differences in the equatorial rotation and density of various planets
are directly in opposition to this theory? How long shall we see even
great mathematicians bolstering up fallacies to supply an evident
hiatus! The "Adepts" have never claimed superior or any knowledge of
Western astronomy and other sciences. Yet turning even to the most
elementary textbooks used in the schools of India, they find that the
centrifugal theory of Western birth is unable to cover all the ground.
That, unaided, it can neither account for every spheroid oblate, nor
explain away such evident difficulties as are presented by the relative
density of some planets. How indeed can any calculation of centrifugal
force explain to us, for instance, why Mercury, whose rotation is, we
are told, only "about one-third that of the Earth, and its density only
about one-fourth greater than the Earth," should have a polar
compression more than ten times greater than the latter? And again, why
Jupiter, whose equatorial rotation is said to be "twenty-seven times
greater, and its density only about one-fifth that of the Earth," should
have its polar compression seventeen times greater than that of the
Earth? Or, why Saturn, with an equatorial velocity fifty-five times
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