Evidently this view is incomplete, but we may endeavour to state it precisely.  If we admit that this medium, the properties of which would explain the attraction, is the same as the luminous ether, we may first ask ourselves whether the action of gravitation is itself also due to oscillations.  Some authors have endeavoured to found a theory on this hypothesis, but we are immediately brought face to face with very serious difficulties.  Gravity appears, in fact, to present quite exceptional characteristics.  No agent, not even those which depend upon the ether, such as light and electricity, has any influence on its action or its direction.  All bodies are, so to speak, absolutely transparent to universal attraction, and no experiment has succeeded in demonstrating that its propagation is not instantaneous.  From various astronomical observations, Laplace concluded that its velocity, in any case, must exceed fifty million times that of light.  It is subject neither to reflection nor to refraction; it is independent of the structure of bodies; and not only is it inexhaustible, but also (as is pointed out, according to M. Hannequin, by an English scholar, James Croll) the distribution of the effects of the attracting force of a mass over the manifold particles which may successively enter the field of its action in no way diminishes the attraction it exercises on each of them respectively, a thing which is seen nowhere else in nature.

Nevertheless it is possible, by means of certain hypotheses, to construct interpretations whereby the appropriate movements of an elastic medium should explain the facts clearly enough.  But these movements are very complex, and it seems almost inconceivable that the same medium could possess simultaneously the state of movement corresponding to the transmission of a luminous phenomenon and that constantly imposed on it by the transmission of gravitation.

Another celebrated hypothesis was devised by Lesage, of Geneva.  Lesage supposed space to be overrun in all directions by currents of ultramundane corpuscles.  This hypothesis, contested by Maxwell, is interesting.  It might perhaps be taken up again in our days, and it is not impossible that the assimilation of these corpuscles to electrons might give a satisfactory image.[28]

[Footnote 28:  M. Sagnac (Le Radium, Jan. 1906, p. 14), following perhaps Professors Elster and Geitel, has lately taken up this idea anew.—­ED.]

M. Cremieux has recently undertaken experiments directed, as he thinks, to showing that the divergences between the phenomena of gravitation and all the other phenomena in nature are more apparent than real.  Thus the evolution in the heart of the ether of a quantity of gravific energy would not be entirely isolated, and as in the case of all evolutions of all energy of whatever kind, it should provoke a partial transformation into energy of a different form.  Thus again the liberated energy of gravitation would vary when passing from one material to another, as from gases into liquids, or from one liquid to a different one.