Page 206 - 89 history of astronomy_opt

same force as the gravity that makes a stone
fall. He saw the difficulty of gravitation
acting through the void space. He com-
pared universal gravitation to magnetism,
and speaks of the work of Gilbert of Colch-
ester. (Gilbert’s book, De Mundo Nos-
tro Sublunari, Philosophia Nova , Amstelo-
dami, 1651, containing similar views, was
published forty-eight years after Gilbert’s
206