Cocks and hens
were put back in their cages. But while doing so, the friends were
astonished to find that the birds, though good sized creatures, and now
pretty fat and plump, hardly felt heavier in their hands than if they
had been so many sparrows. This drew their interested attention to a new
phenomenon.
From the moment they had left the Earth, their own weight, and that of
the Projectile and the objects therein contained, had been undergoing a
progressive diminution. They might never be able to ascertain this fact
with regard to the Projectile, but the moment was now rapidly
approaching when the loss of weight would become perfectly sensible,
both regarding themselves and the tools and instruments surrounding
them. Of course, it is quite clear, that this decrease could not be
indicated by an ordinary scales, as the weight to balance the object
would have lost precisely as much as the object itself. But a spring
balance, for instance, in which the tension of the coil is independent
of attraction, would have readily given the exact equivalent of the
loss.
Attraction or weight, according to Newton's well known law, acting in
direct proportion to the mass of the attracting body and in inverse
proportion to the square of the distance, this consequence clearly
follows: Had the Earth been alone in space, or had the other heavenly
bodies been suddenly annihilated, the further from the Earth the
Projectile would be, the less weight it would have.
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