THE ATTRACTION OF GRAVITATION.
Both Dante and Shakspeare preceded Newton in knowledge of the principle, if not the law, of gravitation. In their anticipation of its discovery, the poets may not have deemed it other than a philosophic or poetic speculation. But the following passages attest earlier observations of a physical law than those of Pascal or Newton.
Shakspeare says in Troilus and Cressida:—
But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth
Drawing all things to it.—iv. 2.
and
True as earth to its centre.—iii. 2.
Three centuries before Shakspeare, Dante said in the Inferno:—
Thou dost imagine we are still
On the other side the central point, where I
Clasped the earth-piercing worm, fell cause of ill.
So far as I continued to descend,
That side we kept; but when I turned, then we
Had passed the point to which all bodies tend.
Canto xxxiv. 106–111.