Laws of Gravitation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. An effort has been made to present along with the memoirs a brief historical account of the various modes of experiment used for finding the mean specific gravity of the earth, and a table of results is added. As the literature on the subject before the present century is not always easily obtainable, the treatment of the matter for that period is given in compara tively greater detail. Believing that a bibliography contain ing every important reference to the subject is an essential feature of a work of this kind, the editor has endeavoured to make himself familiar with the whole of the very extensive literature relating to it, and accordingly is fairly confident that no important memoir has escaped his observation. From the mass of material thus collected the bibliography given at the end of the volume has been compiled. In order to keep within the limits of space assigned, some references had to be omitted, but they relate mainly to recent work, and it is believed that they contain nothing of importance.