Planetary motion in a retarded Newtonian potential field

The problem of the motion of a planet within a solar system which is itself in uniform motion with respect to an "absolute" space has been discussed from the time of Laplace up to shortly after the advent of Einstein's gravitational theory. The latest work seems to have been done by Lodge(1) and Eddington,(1) who conclude that the pre-relativity discrepancies between theory and observation are not explicable in terms of variability of mass with velocity of the planet.