Gravity appears, in fact, to present quite exceptional characteristics.

No agent, not even those which depend upon the ether, such as light and electricity, has any influence on its action or its direction.

All bodies are, so to speak, absolutely transparent to universal attraction, and no experiment has succeeded in demonstrating that its propagation is not instantaneous.

From various astronomical observations, Laplace concluded that its velocity, in any case, must exceed fifty million times that of light.
It is subject neither to reflection nor to refraction; it is independent of the structure of bodies; and not only is it inexhaustible, but also (as is pointed out, according to M.Hannequin, by an English scholar, James Croll) the distribution of the effects of the attracting force of a mass over the manifold particles which may successively enter the field of its action in no way diminishes the attraction it exercises on each of them respectively, a thing which is seen nowhere else in nature.
Nevertheless it is possible, by means of certain hypotheses, to construct interpretations whereby the appropriate movements of an elastic medium should explain the facts clearly enough.

But these movements are very complex, and it seems almost inconceivable that the same medium could possess simultaneously the state of movement corresponding to the transmission of a luminous phenomenon and that constantly imposed on it by the transmission of gravitation.
Another celebrated hypothesis was devised by Lesage, of Geneva.