Definition of "preponderant"

[…] if the Oyle and Water being in an Aequilibrium, you gently lift up the Pipe, […] the depth of the water being lessend, the oyle in the Pipe will grow praeponderant, and therefore will fall out in Drops or Globuls, which by the greater Specifick Gravity of the water, will be buoy’d up to the Top of the Liquor, and there flote:

1666, Robert Boyle, Hydrostatical Paradoxes‎, Oxford: Richard Davis, Paradox I, page 28

Behold the balanc’d Scales suspended stand,Neither a jot inclin’d to either hand:But place the smallest grain of weight in one,Straight the fraternal equipoise is gone;The loaded scale, preponderant, downward flies,Drags down the chain, and makes it’s [sic] partner rise.

1767, George Canning, “Anti-Lucretius”, in Poems‎, London: for the author, page 281

For the present, however, the Swedes were the preponderant party in the neighbourhood; they had fortified the chateau of Falkenberg, and made it a very strong military post;

1832, Thomas De Quincey, chapter 7, in Klosterheim: or, The Masque‎, London: T. Cadell, pages 109–110

The place was much like any ordinary lab., crowded with jars, test-tubes, retorts and so on. It evidently served for work on both the physical and the biological sciences, but the biological was preponderant.

1936, Olaf Stapledon, chapter 20, in Odd John‎, New York: Galaxy Publishing, page 136