which is more than twenty million times as great as is the pull between the earth and our sun.
Simple calculations such as these could have been made at any time; there is nothing novel about them, as there is about the estimate of the ether's density and vast intrinsic energy, in Chapters [VI] and [VII]. But then there is nothing hypothetical or uncertain about them either; they are certain and definite: whereas it may be thought there is something doubtful about the newer contentions which involve consideration of the mass and size of electrons and of the uniform and incompressible character of etherial constitution. Even the idea of "massiveness" as applied to the ether involves an element of uncertainty, or of figurativeness; because until we know more about ether's peculiar nature (if it is peculiar), we have to deal with it in accordance with material analogies, and must specify its massiveness as that which would have to be possessed by it if it fulfilled its functions and yet were anything like ordinary matter. It cannot really be ordinary matter, because ordinary matter is definitely differentiated from it, and is presumably composed of it; but the inertia of ordinary matter, however it be electrically or magnetically explained, must in the last resort depend on something parentally akin to inertia in the fundamental substance which fills space. And this it is which we have attempted in Chapters [VI] and [VII] to evaluate and to express in the soberest terms possible.
CHAPTER X
GENERAL THEORY OF ABERRATION
In Chapter [III] the subject of Aberration was treated in a simple and geometrical manner, but it is now time to deal with it more generally. And to do this compactly I must be content in the greater part of this chapter to appeal chiefly to physicists.
The following general statements concerning aberration can be made:—
1. A ray of light in clear space is straight, whatever the motion of the medium, unless eddies exist; in other words, no irrotational disturbance of ether can deflect a ray.