With a New Reply to John Wallis
[HALE, Matthew, Sir.]
An Essay touching the Gravitation, or non-Gravitation of fluid Bodies, and the Reasons thereof. The second Edition, with some occasional Additions. London, Printed by W. Godbid, for William Shrowsbury … 1675.
8vo, pp. [6], 88, 23, [1]; title-page slightly browned but a very good copy in contemporary mottled sheep, ruled in blind; edges worn, front cover detached, later paper spine label (attributing the work to Henry More); French library stamps to title-page (Ecole Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, closed 1901, and another Jesuit institution).
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An Essay touching the Gravitation, or non-Gravitation of fluid Bodies, and the Reasons thereof. The second Edition, with some occasional Additions.
Second edition, scarce, a reissue of the sheets of the first (1673), with a cancel title-page, and ‘Some occasional additions to the pamphlet called the essay’ (the second paginated sequence).
Hale’s Essay, intended as an anti-mechanistic confutation of Boyle, ‘explained the supposed phenomenon that fluid bodies do not gravitate (that water at the bottom of the sea is not significantly pressed upon by water higher up)’, and elicited replies from both John Wallis (A Discourse of Gravity and Gravitation, 1675) and Henry More (Remarks upon Two Late Ingenious Discourses, 1676). Wallis had been sent the work by Oldenburg in July 1673, but did not ‘think it necessary to concern my self so much as to take publike notice of it; but leave it to take its fortune: And so I suppose will Mr Boyle … A private discourse with the Author (I suppose) might serve to satisfy him, that his notion will not satisfy’ (Wallis, Correspondence). It evidently rankled though, and Wallis delivered a paper on the subject to the Royal Society in November 1674, which was ordered into print in January 1675. Hale was quick to respond, reissuing the unsold sheets of 1673 with a new section replying to Wallis. ‘Upon the whole matter,’ he concludes, ‘I do not at all find the supposition delivered in the pamphlet called the Essay, nor the Reasons thereof any way weakned, by the Objections made against it’.
Scarce, with a total of nine copies in ESTC. Wing H245.