GERDIL, Hyacinthe-Sigismond. Dissertations sur l'incompatibilité de l'attraction et de ses différentes loix, avec les phénomènes et sur les Tuyaux capillaires. 1754.

Born in Savoy, in 1718 Gerdil was appointed Cardinal in 1777, and could have been Pope after the death of Pie VI, without the Austrian veto who does not want a French Pope.
This is not only a theologian, a philosopher, a moralist, a jurist, but also a mathematician and physicist. He has published several essays on the highest questions of mathematics and physics.

In "Essays on the incompatibility ...", are explained, according Montucla, the best objections against the Newtonian theory on attraction.
Not more than Fontenelle and Mairan, Gerdil rejects Newton's calculations, but it pushes the cause he assigns to the phenomena.

At this "dark and mysterious" attraction he opposes the clarity with which the tendency to conceive of bodies towards each other, under the mass of material, by which the motion is communicated successively and continuously from one to another.

RARE FIRST EDITION. Very good copy.