ON THE MOTION OF PENDULUMS. 5
probably because such persons were not likely to seek in a treatise on hydraulics for information connected with the subject of their researches. Dubuat had, in fact, rather applied the pendulum to hydrodynamics than hydrodynamics to the pendulum.
In the Philosophical Magazine for September 1833, p. 185, is a short paper by Professor Challis, on the subject of the resistance to a ball pendulum. After referring to a former paper, in which he had shewn that no sensible error would be committed in a problem of this nature by neglecting the compressibility of the fluid even if it be elastic, Professor Challis, adopting a particular hypothesis respecting the motion, obtains 2 for the value of the factor n for such a pendulum. This mode of solution, which is adopted in several subsequent papers, has given rise to a controversy between Professor Challis and the Astronomer Eoyal, who maintains the justice of Poisson's result.
In a paper read before the "Royal Society of Edinburgh on the 16th of December 1833, and printed in the 13th Volume of the Society's Transactions, Green has determined from the common equations of fluid motion the resistance to an ellipsoid performing small oscillations without rotation. The result is expressed by a definite integral; but when two of the principal axes of the ellipsoid become equal, the integral admits of expression in finite terms, by means of circular or logarithmic functions. When the ellipsoid becomes a sphere, Green's result reduces itself to Poisson's.
In a memoir read before the Royal Academy of Turin on the 18th of January 1835, and printed in the 37th Volume of the memoirs of the Academy, M. Plan a has entered at great length into the theory of the resistance of fluids to pendulums. This memoir contains, however, rather a detailed examination of various points connected with the theory 3 than the determination of the resistance for any new form of pendulum. The author first treats the case of an incompressible fluid, and then shews that the result would be sensibly the same in the case of an elastic fluid. In the case of a ball pendulum, the only one in which a complete solution of the problem is effected, M. Plana's result agrees with Poisson's.
In a paper read before the Cambridge Philosophical Society on the 29th of May 1843, and printed in the 8th Volume of the Transactions, p. 105*, I have determined the resistance to a ball * [Ante, Vol. i. p. 179.]