6. HOW the waves are excited in the surface of stagnant water, may be thus conceived. Suppose in any place, the water raised above the rest in form of a small hillock; that water will immediately subside, and raise the circumambient water above the level of the parts more remote, to which the motion cannot be communicated under longer time. And again, the water in subsiding will acquire, like all falling bodies, a force, which will carry it below the level surface, till at length the pressure of the ambient water prevailing, it will rise again, and even with a force like to that wherewith it descended, which will carry it again above the level. But in the mean time the ambient water before raised will subside, as this did, sinking below the level; and in so doing, will not only raise the water, which first subsided, but also the water next without itself. So that now beside the first hillock, we shall have a ring investing it, at some distance raised above the plain surface likewise; and between them the water will be sunk below the rest of the surface. After this, the first hillock, and the new made annular rising, will descend; raising the water between them, which was before depressed, and likewise the adjacent part of the surface without. Thus will these annular waves be successively spread more and more. For, as the hillock subsiding produces one ring, and that ring subsiding raises again the hillock, and a second ring; so the hillock and second ring subsiding together raise the first ring, and a third; then this first and third ring subsiding together raise the first hillock, the second ring, and a fourth; and so on continually, till the motion by degrees ceases. Now it is demonstrated, that these rings ascend and descend in the manner of a pendulum; descending with a motion continually accelerated, till they become even with the plain surface of the fluid, which is half the space they descend; and then being retarded again by the same degrees as those, whereby they were accelerated, till they are depressed below the plain surface, as much as they were before raised above it: and that this augmentation and diminution of their velocity proceeds by the same degrees, as that of a pendulum vibrating in a cycloid, and whose length should be a fourth part of the distance between any two adjacent waves: and farther, that a new ring is produced every time a pendulum, whose length is four times the former, that is, equal to the interval between the summits of two waves, makes one oscillation or swing[266].