236] The intention of the remaining experiments was to find out the proportion which the quantity of redundant fluid in bodies of several different shapes and sizes, would bear to each other if placed at a considerable distance from each other and connected together by a slender wire, or, which comes to the same thing, to find the proportion which the quantity of redundant fluid in them would bear to each other if they were successively connected by a slender wire to a third body placed at a great distance from them, supposing the quantity of redundant fluid in the third body to be the same each time; and to examine how far that proportion agrees with what it should be by theory if the bodies were connected by canals of incompressible fluid.

237] To avoid circumlocution I shall frequently in the following pages make use of a term the meaning of which is given in the following definition.

Def. When in relating any experiment in which two bodies B and b were successively connected to a third body and overcharged, I say that the charge of B was found to be to that of b as P to 1, I mean that the quantity of redundant fluid in B would have been to that in b in the above proportion,