Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation - Fatio

Fatio

Nicolas Fatio presented the first formulation of his thoughts on gravitation in a letter to Christiaan Huygens in the spring of 1690. Two days later Fatio read the content of the letter before the Royal Society in London. In the following years Fatio composed several draft manuscripts of his major work De la Cause de la Pesanteur, but none of this material was published in his lifetime. In 1731 Fatio also sent his theory as a Latin poem, in the style of Lucretius, to the Paris Academy of Science, but it was dismissed. Some fragments of these manuscripts and copies of the poem were later acquired by Le Sage who failed to find a publisher for Fatio's papers. So it lasted until 1929, when the only complete copy of Fatio's manuscript was published by Karl Bopp, and in 1949 Gagnebin used the collected fragments in possession of Le Sage to reconstruct the paper. The Gagnebin edition includes revisions made by Fatio as late as 1743, forty years after he composed the draft on which the Bopp edition was based. However, the second half of the Bopp edition contains the mathematically most advanced parts of Fatio's theory, and were not included by Gagnebin in his edition. For a detailed analysis of Fatio's work, and a comparison between the Bopp and the Gagnebin editions, see Zehe The following description is mainly based on the Bopp edition.