Notwithstanding the apparent certainty of these pendulum experiments, and the supposed exactitude of the conclusions deducible therefrom, many of the same school of philosophy differed with each other, remained dissatisfied, and raised very serious objections both to the value of the experiments themselves, and to the supposed proof which they furnished of the Earth’s rotation. One writer in the _Times_ newspaper of the period, who signs himself “B. A. C.,” says, “I have read the accounts of the Parisian experiment as they have appeared in many of our papers, and must confess that I still remain unconvinced of the reality of the phenomenon. It appears to me that, except at the pole where the point of suspension is immovable, no result can be obtained. In other cases the shifting of the direction of passage through the lowest point that takes place during an excursion of the pendulum, from that point in one direction and its return to it again, will be exactly compensated by the corresponding shifting in the contrary direction during the pendulum’s excursion on the opposite side. Take a particular case. Suppose the pendulum in any latitude to be set oscillating in the meridian plane, and to be started from the vertical towards the south. It is obvious that the wire by which it is suspended _does not continue to describe a plane_, but a species of conoidal surface; that when the pendulum has reached its extreme point its direction is to the south-west, and that as the tangent plane to the described surface through the point of suspension necessarily contains the normal to the Earth at the same point, the pendulum on its return passes through the same point in the direction north-east. Now, starting again from this point, we have exactly the circumstances of the last case, the primary plane being shifted slightly out of the meridian; when, therefore, the pendulum has reached its extreme point of excursion the direction of the wire is to the west of this plane, and when it returns to the vertical the direction of passage through the lowest point is as much to the west of this plane as it was in the former case to the west of the meridian plane; but since it is now moving from north to south instead of from south to north, as in the former case, its former deviation receives complete compensation, and the primary plane returns again to the meridian, when the whole process recurs.”