History of the inductive sciences, from the earliest to the present time

by William Whewell

BOOK VII.

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THE MECHANICAL SCIENCES.
(CONTINUED.)

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HISTORY
OF
PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY.

DESCEND from heaven, Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine
Following, above the Olympian hill I soar,
Above the flight of Pegasean wing.
The meaning, not the name, I call, for thou
Nor of the muses nine, nor on the top
Of old Olympus dwell’st: but heavenly-born,
Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with Eternal Wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom, thy sister.

Paradise Lost, B. vii.

CHAPTER I.
Prelude to the Inductive Epoch of Newton.

WE have now to contemplate the last and most splendid period of the progress of Astronomy;—the grand completion of the history of the most ancient and prosperous province of human knowledge;—the steps which elevated this science to an unrivalled eminence above other sciences;—the first great example of a wide and complex assemblage of phenomena indubitably traced to their single simple cause;—in short, the first example of the formation of a perfect Inductive Science.

In this, as in other considerable advances in real science, the complete disclosure of the new truths by the principal discoverer, was preceded by movements and glimpses, by trials, seekings, and guesses on the part of others; by indications, in short, that men’s minds were already carried by their intellectual impulses in the direction in which the truth lay, and were beginning to detect its nature. In a case so important and interesting as this, it is more peculiarly proper to give some view of this Prelude to the Epoch of the full discovery.

(Francis Bacon.) That Astronomy should become Physical Astronomy,—that the motions of the heavenly bodies should be traced to their causes, as well as reduced to rule,—was felt by all persons of active and philosophical minds as a pressing and irresistible need, at the time of which we speak. We have already seen how much this feeling had to do in impelling Kepler to the train of laborious research by which he made his discoveries. Perhaps it may be interesting to point out how strongly this persuasion of the necessity of giving a physical character to astronomy, had taken possession of the mind of Bacon, who, looking at the progress of knowledge with a more comprehensive spirit, and from a higher point of view than Kepler, could have none of his astronomical prejudices, since on that subject he was of a different school, and of far inferior knowledge. In his “Description of the Intellectual Globe,” Bacon says that while Astronomy had, up to that time, had it for her business to inquire into the rules of the heavenly motions, and Philosophy into their causes, they had both so far worked without due appreciation of their respective tasks; Philosophy neglecting facts, and Astronomy claiming assent to her [386] mathematical hypotheses, which ought to be considered as mere steps of calculation. “Since, therefore,” he continues,[1] “each science has hitherto been a slight and ill-constructed thing, we must assuredly take a firmer stand; our ground being, that these two subjects, which on account of the narrowness of men’s views and the traditions of professors have been so long dissevered, are, in fact, one and the same thing, and compose one body of science.” It must be allowed that, however erroneous might be the points of Bacon’s positive astronomical creed, these general views of the nature and position of the science are most sound and philosophical.

[1] Vol. ix. 221.

(Kepler) In his attempts to suggest a right physical view of the starry heavens and their relation to the earth, Bacon failed, along with all the writers of his time. It has already been stated that the main cause of this failure was the want of a knowledge of the true theory of motion;—the non-existence of the science of Dynamics. At the time of Bacon and Kepler, it was only just beginning to be possible to reduce the heavenly motions to the laws of earthly motion, because the latter were only just then divulged. Accordingly, we have seen that the whole of Kepler’s physical speculations proceed upon an ignorance of the first law of motion, and assume it to be the main problem of the physical astronomer to assign the cause which keeps up the motions of the planets. Kepler’s doctrine is, that a certain Force or Virtue resides in the sun, by which all bodies within his influence are carried round him. He illustrates[2] the nature of this Virtue in various ways, comparing it to Light, and to the Magnetic Power, which it resembles in the circumstances of operating at a distance, and also in exercising a feebler influence as the distance becomes greater. But it was obvious that these comparisons were very imperfect; for they do not explain how the sun produces in a body at a distance a motion athwart the line of emanation; and though Kepler introduced an assumed rotation of the sun on his axis as the cause of this effect, that such a cause could produce the result could not be established by any analogy of terrestrial motions. But another image to which he referred, suggested a much more substantial and conceivable kind of mechanical action by which the celestial motions might be produced, namely, a current of fluid matter circulating round the sun, and carrying the planet with it, like a boat in a stream. In the Table of Contents of the work on the planet Mars, the purport of the chapter to which I have alluded is [387] stated as follows: “A physical speculation, in which it is demonstrated that the vehicle of that Virtue which urges the planets, circulates through the spaces of the universe after the manner of a river or whirlpool (vortex), moving quicker than the planets.” I think it will be found, by any one who reads Kepler’s phrases concerning the moving force,—the magnetic nature,—the immaterial virtue of the sun, that they convey no distinct conception, except so far as they are interpreted by the expressions just quoted. A vortex of fluid constantly whirling round the sun, kept in this whirling motion by the rotation of the sun himself, and carrying the planets round the sun by its revolution, as a whirlpool carries straws, could be readily understood; and though it appears to have been held by Kepler that this current and vortex was immaterial, he ascribes to it the power of overcoming the inertia of bodies, and of putting them and keeping them in motion, the only material properties with which he had any thing to do. Kepler’s physical reasonings, therefore, amount, in fact, to the doctrine of Vortices round the central bodies, and are occasionally so stated by himself; though by asserting these vortices to be “an immaterial species,” and by the fickleness and variety of his phraseology on the subject, he leaves this theory in some confusion;—a proceeding, indeed, which both his want of sound mechanical conceptions, and his busy and inventive fancy, might have led us to expect. Nor, we may venture to say, was it easy for any one at Kepler’s time to devise a more plausible theory than the theory of vortices might have been made. It was only with the formation and progress of the science of Mechanics that this theory became untenable.

[2] De Stellâ Martis, P. 3. c. xxxiv.

(Descartes) But if Kepler might be excused, or indeed admired, for propounding the theory of Vortices at his time, the case was different when the laws of motion had been fully developed, and when those who knew the state of mechanical science ought to have learned to consider the motions of the stars as a mechanical problem, subject to the same conditions as other mechanical problems, and capable of the same exactness of solution. And there was an especial inconsistency in the circumstance of the Theory of Vortices being put forwards by Descartes, who pretended, or was asserted by his admirers, to have been one of the discoverers of the true Laws of Motion. It certainly shows both great conceit and great shallowness, that he should have proclaimed with much pomp this crude invention of the ante-mechanical period, at the time when the best mathematicians of Europe, as Borelli in Italy, Hooke and Wallis in England, Huyghens in Holland, [388] were patiently laboring to bring the mechanical problem of the universe into its most distinct form, in order that it might be solved at last and forever.

I do not mean to assert that Descartes borrowed his doctrines from Kepler, or from any of his predecessors, for the theory was sufficiently obvious; and especially if we suppose the inventor to seek his suggestions rather in the casual examples offered to the sense than in the exact laws of motion. Nor would it be reasonable to rob this philosopher of that credit, of the plausible deduction of a vast system from apparently simple principles, which, at the time, was so much admired; and which undoubtedly was the great cause of the many converts to his views. At the same time we may venture to say that a system of doctrine thus deduced from assumed principles by a long chain of reasoning, and not verified and confirmed at every step by detailed and exact facts, has hardly a chance of containing any truth. Descartes said that he should think it little to show how the world is constructed, if he could not also show that it must of necessity have been so constructed. The more modest philosophy which has survived the boastings of his school is content to receive all its knowledge of facts from experience, and never dreams of interposing its peremptory must be when nature is ready to tell us what is. The à priori philosopher has, however, always a strong feeling in his favor among men. The deductive form of his speculations gives them something of the charm and the apparent certainty of pure mathematics; and while he avoids that laborious recurrence to experiments, and measures, and multiplied observations, which is irksome and distasteful to those who are impatient to grow wise at once, every fact of which the theory appears to give an explanation, seems to be an unasked and almost an infallible witness in its favor.

My business with Descartes here is only with his physical Theory of Vortices; which, great as was its glory at one time, is now utterly extinguished. It was propounded in his Principia Philosophiæ, in 1644. In order to arrive at this theory, he begins, as might be expected of him, from reasonings sufficiently general. He lays it down as a maxim, in the first sentence of his book, that a person who seeks for truth must, once in his life, doubt of all that he most believes. Conceiving himself thus to have stripped himself of all his belief on all subjects, in order to resume that part of it which merits to be retained, he begins with his celebrated assertion, “I think, therefore I am;” which appears to him a certain and immovable principle, by means of [389] which he may proceed to something more. Accordingly, to this he soon adds the idea, and hence the certain existence, of God and his perfections. He then asserts it to be also manifest, that a vacuum in any part of the universe is impossible; the whole must be filled with matter, and the matter must be divided into equal angular parts, this being the most simple, and therefore the most natural supposition.[3] This matter being in motion, the parts are necessarily ground into a spherical form; and the corners thus rubbed off (like filings or sawdust) form a second and more subtle matter.[4] There is, besides, a third kind of matter, of parts more coarse and less fitted for motion. The first matter makes luminous bodies, as the sun, and the fixed stars; the second is the transparent substance of the skies; the third is the material of opake bodies, as the earth, planets, and comets. We may suppose, also,[5] that the motions of these parts take the form of revolving circular currents,[6] or vortices. By this means, the first matter will be collected to the centre of each vortex, while the second, or subtle matter, surrounds it, and, by its centrifugal effort, constitutes light. The planets are carried round the sun by the motion of his vortex,[7] each planet being at such a distance from the sun as to be in a part of the vortex suitable to its solidity and mobility. The motions are prevented from being exactly circular and regular by various causes; for instance, a vortex may be pressed into an oval shape by contiguous vortices. The satellites are, in like manner, carried round their primary planets by subordinate vortices; while the comets have sometimes the liberty of gliding out of one vortex into the one next contiguous, and thus travelling in a sinuous course, from system to system, through the universe. It is not necessary for us to speak here of the entire deficiency of this system in mechanical consistency, and in a correspondency to observation in details and measures. Its general reception and temporary sway, in some instances even among intelligent men and good mathematicians, are the most remarkable facts connected with it. These may be ascribed, in part, to the circumstance that philosophers were now ready and eager for a physical astronomy commensurate with the existing state of knowledge; they may have been owing also, in some measure, to the character and position of Descartes. He was a man of high claims in every department of speculation, and, in pure mathematics, a genuine inventor of great eminence;—a man of family and a soldier;—an inoffensive philosopher, attacked and persecuted [390] for his opinions with great bigotry and fury by a Dutch divine, Voet;—the favorite and teacher of two distinguished princesses, and, it is said, the lover of one of them. This was Elizabeth, the daughter of the Elector Frederick, and consequently grand-daughter of our James the First. His other royal disciple, the celebrated Christiana of Sweden, showed her zeal for his instructions by appointing the hour of five in the morning for their interviews. This, in the climate of Sweden, and in the winter, was too severe a trial for the constitution of the philosopher, born in the sunny valley of the Loire; and, after a short residence at Stockholm, he died of an inflammation of the chest in 1650. He always kept up an active correspondence with his friend Mersenne, who was called, by some of the Parisians, “the Resident of Descartes at Paris;” and who informed him of all that was done in the world of science. It is said that he at first sent to Mersenne an account of a system of the universe which he had devised, which went on the assumption of a vacuum; Mersenne informed him that the vacuum was no longer the fashion at Paris; upon which he proceeded to remodel his system, and to re-establish it on the principle of a plenum. Undoubtedly he tried to avoid promulgating opinions which might bring him into trouble. He, on all occasions, endeavored to explain away the doctrine of the motion of the earth, so as to evade the scruples to which the decrees of the pope had given rise; and, in stating the theory of vortices, he says,[8] “There is no doubt that the world was created at first with all its perfection; nevertheless, it is well to consider how it might have arisen from certain principles, although we know that it did not.” Indeed, in the whole of his philosophy, he appears to deserve the character of being both rash and cowardly, “pusillanimus simul et audax,” far more than Aristotle, to whose physical speculations Bacon applies this description.[9]

[3] Prin. p. 58.

[4] Ib. p. 59.

[5] Ib. p. 56.

[6] Ib. p. 61.

[7] Ib. c. 140, p. 114.

[8] Prin. p. 56.

[9] Bacon, Descriptio Globi Intellectualis.

Whatever the causes might be, his system was well received and rapidly adopted. Gassendi, indeed, says that he found nobody who had the courage to read the Principia through;[10] but the system was soon embraced by the younger professors, who were eager to dispute in its favor. It is said[11] that the University of Paris was on the point of publishing an edict against these new doctrines, and was only prevented from doing so by a pasquinade which is worth mentioning. It was composed by the poet Boileau (about 1684), and professed to be a Request in favor of Aristotle, and an Edict issued from Mount [391] Parnassus in consequence. It is obvious that, at this time, the cause of Cartesianism was looked upon as the cause of free inquiry and modern discovery, in opposition to that of bigotry, prejudice, and ignorance. Probably the poet was far from being a very severe or profound critic of the truth of such claims. “This petition of the Masters of Arts, Professors and Regents of the University of Paris, humbly showeth, that it is of public notoriety that the sublime and incomparable Aristotle was, without contest, the first founder of the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water; that he did, by special grace, accord unto them a simplicity which belongeth not to them of natural right;” and so on. “Nevertheless, since, a certain time past, two individuals, named Reason and Experience, have leagued themselves together to dispute his claim to the rank which of justice pertains to him, and have tried to erect themselves a throne on the ruins of his authority; and, in order the better to gain their ends, have excited certain factious spirits, who, under the names of Cartesians and Gassendists, have begun to shake off the yoke of their master, Aristotle; and, contemning his authority, with unexampled temerity, would dispute the right which he had acquired of making true pass for false and false for true;”—In fact, this production does not exhibit any of the peculiar tenets of Descartes, although, probably, the positive points of his doctrines obtained a footing in the University of Paris, under the cover of this assault on his adversaries. The Physics of Rohault, a zealous disciple of Descartes, was published at Paris about 1670,[12] and was, for a time, the standard book for students of this subject, both in France and in England. I do not here speak of the later defenders of the Cartesian system, for, in their hands, it was much modified by the struggle which it had to maintain against the Newtonian system.

[10] Del. A. M. ii. 193.

[11] Enc. Brit. art. Cartesianism.

[12] And a second edition in 1672.

We are concerned with Descartes and his school only as they form part of the picture of the intellectual condition of Europe just before the publication of Newton’s discoveries. Beyond this, the Cartesian speculations are without value. When, indeed, Descartes’ countrymen could no longer refuse their assent and admiration to the Newtonian theory, it came to be the fashion among them to say that Descartes had been the necessary precursor of Newton; and to adopt a favorite saying of Leibnitz, that the Cartesian philosophy was the antechamber of Truth. Yet this comparison is far from being happy: it appeared rather as if these suitors had mistaken the door; for those [392] who first came into the presence of Truth herself, were those who never entered this imagined antechamber, and those who were in the antechamber first, were the last in penetrating further. In partly the same spirit, Playfair has noted it as a service which Newton perhaps owed to Descartes, that “he had exhausted one of the most tempting forms of error.” We shall see soon that this temptation had no attraction for those who looked at the problem in its true light, as the Italian and English philosophers already did. Voltaire has observed, far more truly, that Newton’s edifice rested on no stone of Descartes’ foundations. He illustrates this by relating that Newton only once read the work of Descartes, and, in doing so, wrote the word “error,” repeatedly, on the first seven or eight pages; after which he read no more. This volume, Voltaire adds, was for some time in the possession of Newton’s nephew.[13]

[13] Cartesianism, Enc. Phil.

(Gassendi.) Even in his own country, the system of Descartes was by no means universally adopted. We have seen that though Gassendi was coupled with Descartes as one of the leaders of the new philosophy, he was far from admiring his work. Gassendi’s own views of the causes of the motions of the heavenly bodies are not very clear, nor even very clearly referrible to the laws of mechanics; although he was one of those who had most share in showing that those laws apply to astronomical motions. In a chapter, headed[14] “Quæ sit motrix siderum causa,” he reviews several opinions; but the one which he seems to adopt, is that which ascribes the motion of the celestial globes to certain fibres, of which the action is similar to that of the muscles of animals. It does not appear, therefore, that he had distinctly apprehended, either the continuation of the movements of the planets by the First Law of Motion, or their deflection by the Second Law;—the two main steps on the road to the discovery of the true forces by which they are made to describe their orbits.

[14] Gassendi, Opera, vol. i. p. 639.

(Leibnitz, &c.) Nor does it appear that in Germany mathematicians had attained this point of view. Leibnitz, as we have seen, did not assent to the opinions of Descartes, as containing the complete truth; and yet his own views of the physics of the universe do not seem to have any great advantage over these. In 1671 he published A new physical hypothesis, by which the causes of most phenomena are deduced from a certain single universal motion supposed in our globe;—not to be despised either by the Tychonians or the Copernicans. He supposes [393] the particles of the earth to have separate motions, which produce collisions, and thus propagate[15] an “agitation of the ether,” radiating in all directions; and,[16] “by the rotation of the sun on its axis, concurring with its rectilinear action on the earth, arises the motion of the earth about the sun.” The other motions of the solar system are, as we might expect, accounted for in a similar manner; but it appears difficult to invest such an hypothesis with any mechanical consistency.

[15] Art. 5.

[16] Ib. 8.

John Bernoulli maintained to the last the Cartesian hypothesis, though with several modifications of his own, and even pretended to apply mathematical calculation to his principles. This, however, belongs to a later period of our history; to the reception, not to the prelude, of the Newtonian theory.

(Borelli.) In Italy, Holland, and England, mathematicians appear to have looked much more steadily at the problem of the celestial motions, by the light which the discovery of the real laws of motion threw upon it. In Borelli’s Theories of the Medicean Planets, printed at Florence in 1666, we have already a conception of the nature of central action, in which true notions begin to appear. The attraction of a body upon another which revolves about it is spoken of and likened to magnetic action; not converting the attracting force into a transverse force, according to the erroneous views of Kepler, but taking it as a tendency of the bodies to meet. “It is manifest,” says he,[17] “that every planet and satellite revolves round some principal globe of the universe as a fountain of virtue, which so draws and holds them that they cannot by any means be separated from it, but are compelled to follow it wherever it goes, in constant and continuous revolutions.” And, further on, he describes[18] the nature of the action, as a matter of conjecture indeed, but with remarkable correctness.[19] “We shall account for these motions by supposing, that which can hardly be denied, that the planets have a certain natural appetite for uniting themselves with the globe round which they revolve, and that they really tend, with all their efforts, to approach to such globe; the planets, for instance, to the sun, the Medicean Stars to Jupiter. It is certain, also, that circular motion gives a body a tendency to recede from the centre of such revolution, as we find in a wheel, or a stone whirled in a sling. Let us suppose, then, the planet to endeavor to approach the sun; since, in the mean time, it requires, by the circular motion, a force to recede from the same central body, it comes to pass, that when [394] those two opposite forces are equal, each compensates the other, and the planet cannot go nearer to the sun nor further from him than a certain determinate space, and thus appears balanced and floating about him.”

[17] Cap. 2.

[18] Ib. 11.

[19] P. 47.

This is a very remarkable passage; but it will be observed, at the same time, that the author has no distinct conception of the manner in which the change of direction of the planet’s motion is regulated from one instant to another; still less do his views lead to any mode of calculating the distance from the central body at which the planet would be thus balanced, or the space through which it might approach to the centre and recede from it. There is a great interval from Borelli’s guesses, even to Huyghens’ theorems and a much greater to the beginning of Newton’s discoveries.

(England.) It is peculiarly interesting to us to trace the gradual approach towards these discoveries which took place in the minds of English mathematicians and this we can do with tolerable distinctness. Gilbert, in his work, De Magnete, printed in 1600, has only some vague notions that the magnetic virtue of the earth in some way determines the direction of the earth’s axis, the rate of its diurnal rotation, and that of the revolution of the moon about it.[20] He died in 1603, and, in his posthumous work, already [mentioned] (De Mundo nostro Sublunari Philosophia nova, 1651), we have already a more distinct statement of the attraction of one body by another.[21] “The force which emanates from the moon reaches to the earth, and, in like manner, the magnetic virtue of the earth pervades the region of the moon: both correspond and conspire by the joint action of both, according to a proportion and conformity of motions; but the earth has more effect, in consequence of its superior mass; the earth attracts and repels the moon, and the moon, within certain limits, the earth; not so as to make the bodies come together, as magnetic bodies do, but so that they may go on in a continuous course.” Though this phraseology is capable of representing a good deal of the truth, it does not appear to have been connected, in the author’s mind, with any very definite notions of mechanical action in detail. We may probably say the same of Milton’s language:

What if the sun
Be centre to the world; and other stars,
By his attractive virtue and their own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?

Par. Lost, B. viii.

[20] Lib. vi. cap. 6, 7.

[21] Ib. ii. c. 19.

[395] Boyle, about the same period, seems to have inclined to the Cartesian hypothesis. Thus, in order to show the advantage of the natural theology which contemplates organic contrivances, over that which refers to astronomy, he remarks: “It may be said, that in bodies inanimate,[22] the contrivance is very rarely so exquisite but that the various motions and occurrences of their parts may, without much improbability, be suspected capable, after many essays, to cast one another into several of those circumvolutions called by Epicurus συστροφὰς and by Descartes, vortices; which being once made, may continue a long time after the manner explained by the latter.” Neither Milton nor Boyle, however, can be supposed to have had an exact knowledge of the laws of mechanics; and therefore they do not fully represent the views of their mathematical contemporaries. But there arose about this time a group of philosophers, who began to knock at the door where Truth was to be found, although it was left for Newton to force it open. These were the founders of the Royal Society, Wilkins, Wallis, Seth Ward, Wren, Hooke, and others. The time of the beginning of the speculations and association of these men corresponds to the time of the civil wars between the king and parliament in England and it does not appear a fanciful account of their scientific zeal and activity, to say, that while they shared the common mental ferment of the times, they sought in the calm and peaceful pursuit of knowledge a contrast to the vexatious and angry struggles which at that time disturbed the repose of society. It was well if these dissensions produced any good to science to balance the obvious evils which flowed from them. Gascoigne, the inventor of the micrometer, a friend of Horrox, was killed in the battle of Marston Moor. Milburne, another friend of Horrox, who like him detected the errors of Lansberg’s astronomical tables, left papers on this subject, which were lost by the coming of the Scotch army into England in 1639; in the civil war which ensued, the anatomical collections of Harvey were plundered and destroyed. Most of these persons of whom I have lately had to speak, were involved in the changes of fortune of the Commonwealth, some on one side, and some on the other. Wilkins was made Warden of Wadham by the committee of parliament appointed for reforming the University of Oxford; and was, in 1659, made Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, by Richard Cromwell, but ejected thence the year following, upon the restoration of the [396] royal sway. Seth Ward, who was a Fellow of Sidney College, Cambridge, was deprived of his Fellowship by the parliamentary committee; but at a later period (1649) he took the engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth, and became Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. Wallis held a Fellowship of Queen’s College, Cambridge, but vacated it by marriage. He was afterwards much employed by the royal party in deciphering secret writings, in which art he had peculiar skill. Yet he was appointed by the parliamentary commissioners Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford, in which situation he was continued by Charles II. after his restoration. Christopher Wren was somewhat later, and escaped these changes. He was chosen Fellow of All-Souls in 1652, and succeeded Ward as Savilian Professor of Astronomy. These men, along with Boyle and several others, formed themselves into a club, which they called the Philosophical, or the Invisible College; and met, from about the year 1645, sometimes in London, and sometimes in Oxford, according to the changes of fortune and residence of the members. Hooke went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1663, where he was patronized by Boyle, Ward, and Wallis; and when the Philosophical College resumed its meetings in London, after the Restoration, as the Royal Society, Hooke was made “curator of experiments.” Halley was of the next generation, and comes after Newton; he studied at Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1673; but was at first a man of some fortune, and not engaged in any official situation. His talents and zeal, however, made him an active and effective ally in the promotion of science.

[22] Shaw’s Boyle’s Works, ii. 160.

The connection of the persons of whom we have been speaking has a bearing on our subject, for it led, historically speaking, to the publication of Newton’s discoveries in physical astronomy. Rightly to propose a problem is no inconsiderable step to its solution; and it was undoubtedly a great advance towards the true theory of the universe to consider the motion of the planets round the sun as a mechanical question, to be solved by a reference to the laws of motion, and by the use of mathematics. So far the English philosophers appear to have gone, before the time of Newton. Hooke, indeed, when the doctrine of gravitation was published, asserted that he had discovered it previously to Newton; and though this pretension could not be maintained, he certainly had perceived that the thing to be done was, to determine the effect of a central force in producing curvilinear motion; which effect, as we have [already] seen, he illustrated by experiment as early as 1666. Hooke had also spoken more clearly on this subject [397] in An Attempt to prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations, published in 1674. In this, he distinctly states that the planets would move in straight lines, if they were not deflected by central forces; and that the central attractive power increases in approaching the centre in certain degrees, dependent on the distance. “Now what these degrees are,” he adds, “I have not yet experimentally verified;” but he ventures to promise to any one who succeeds in this undertaking, a discovery of the cause of the heavenly motions. He asserted, in conversation, to Halley and Wren, that he had solved this problem, but his solution was never produced. The proposition that the attractive force of the sun varies inversely as the square of the distance from the centre, had already been divined, if not fully established. If the orbits of the planets were circles, this proportion of the forces might be deduced in the same manner as the propositions concerning circular motion, which Huyghens published in 1673; yet it does not appear that Huyghens made this application of his principles. Newton, however, had already made this step some years before this time. Accordingly, he says in a letter to Halley, on Hooke’s claim to this discovery,[23] “When Huygenius put out his Horologium Oscillatorium, a copy being presented to me, in my letter of thanks I gave those rules in the end thereof a particular commendation for their usefulness in computing the forces of the moon from the earth, and the earth from the sun.” He says, moreover, “I am almost confident by circumstances, that Sir Christopher Wren knew the duplicate proportion when I gave him a visit; and then Mr. Hooke, by his book Cometa, will prove the last of us three that knew it.” Hooke’s Cometa was published in 1678. These inferences were all connected with Kepler’s law, that the times are in the sesquiplicate ratio of the major axes of the orbits. But Halley had also been led to the duplicate proportion by another train of reasoning, namely, by considering the force of the sun as an emanation, which must become more feeble in proportion to the increased spherical surface over which it is diffused, and therefore in the inverse proportion of the square of the distances.[24] In this view of the matter, however, the difficulty was to determine what would be the motion of a body acted on by such a force, when the orbit is not circular but oblong. The investigation of this case was a problem which, we can [398] easily conceive, must have appeared of very formidable complexity while it was unsolved, and the first of its kind. Accordingly Halley, as his biographer says, “finding himself unable to make it out in any geometrical way, first applied to Mr. Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, and meeting with no assistance from either of them, he went to Cambridge in August (1684), to Mr. Newton, who supplied him fully with what he had so ardently sought.”

[23] Biog. Brit., art. Hooke.

[24] Bullialdus, in 1645, had asserted that the force by which the sun “prehendit et harpagat,” takes hold of and grapples the planets, must be as the inverse square of the distance.

A paper of Halley’s in the Philosophical Transactions for January, 1686, professedly inserted as a preparation for Newton’s work, contains some arguments against the Cartesian hypothesis of gravity, which seem to imply that Cartesian opinions had some footing among English philosophers; and we are told by Whiston, Newton’s successor in his professorship at Cambridge, that Cartesianism formed a part of the studies of that place. Indeed, Rohault’s Physics was used as a classbook at that University long after the time of which we are speaking; but the peculiar Cartesian doctrines which it contained were soon superseded by others.

With regard, then, to this part of the discovery, that the force of the sun follows the inverse duplicate proportion of the distances, we see that several other persons were on the verge of it at the same time with Newton; though he alone possessed that combination of distinctness of thought and power of mathematical invention, which enabled him to force his way across the barrier. But another, and so far as we know, an earlier train of thought, led by a different path to the same result; and it was the convergence of these two lines of reasoning that brought the conclusion to men’s minds with irresistible force. I speak now of the identification of the force which retains the moon in her orbit with the force of gravity by which bodies fall at the earth’s surface. In this comparison Newton had, so far as I am aware, no forerunner. We are now, therefore, arrived at the point at which the history of Newton’s great discovery properly begins. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~ [399]

CHAPTER II.
The Inductive Epoch of Newton.—Discovery of the Universal Gravitation of Matter, according to the Law of the Inverse Square of the Distance.

IN order that we may the more clearly consider the bearing of this, the greatest scientific discovery ever made, we shall resolve it into the partial propositions of which it consists. Of these we may enumerate five. The doctrine of universal gravitation asserts,

1. That the force by which the different planets are attracted to the sun is in the inverse proportion of the squares of their distances;

2. That the force by which the same planet is attracted to the sun, in different parts of its orbit, is also in the inverse proportion of the squares of the distances;

3. That the earth also exerts such a force on the moon, and that this force is identical with the force of gravity;

4. That bodies thus act on other bodies, besides those which revolve round them; thus, that the sun exerts such a force on the moon and satellites, and that the planets exert such forces on one another;

5. That this force, thus exerted by the general masses of the sun, earth, and planets, arises from the attraction of each particle of these masses; which attraction follows the above law, and belongs to all matter alike.

The history of the establishment of these five truths will be given in order.

1. Sun’s Force on Different Planets.—With regard to the first of the above five propositions, that the different planets are attracted to the sun by a force which is inversely as the square of the distance, Newton had so far been anticipated, that several persons had discovered it to be true, or nearly true; that is, they had discovered that if the orbits of the planets were circles, the proportions of the central force to the inverse square of the distance would follow from Kepler’s third law, of the sesquiplicate proportion of the periodic times. As we have seen, Huyghens’ theorems would have proved this, if they had been so applied; Wren knew it; Hooke not only knew it, but claimed a prior knowledge to Newton; and Halley had satisfied himself that it was at [400] least nearly true, before he visited Newton. Hooke was reported to Newton at Cambridge, as having applied to the Royal Society to do him justice with regard to his claims; but when Halley wrote and informed Newton (in a letter dated June 29, 1686), that Hooke’s conduct “had been represented in worse colors than it ought,” Newton inserted in his book a notice of these his predecessors, in order, as he said, “to compose the dispute.”[25] This notice appears in a Scholium to the fourth Proposition of the Principia, which states the general law of revolutions in circles. “The case of the sixth corollary,” Newton there says, “obtains in the celestial bodies, as has been separately inferred by our countrymen, Wren, Hooke, and Halley;” he soon after names Huyghens, “who, in his excellent treatise De Horologio Oscillatorio, compares the force of gravity with the centrifugal forces of revolving bodies.”

[25] Biog. Brit. folio, art. Hooke.

The two steps requisite for this discovery were, to propose the motions of the planets as simply a mechanical problem, and to apply mathematical reasoning so as to solve this problem, with reference to Kepler’s third law considered as a fact. The former step was a consequence of the mechanical discoveries of Galileo and his school; the result of the firm and clear place which these gradually obtained in men’s mind, and of the utter abolition of all the notions of solid spheres by Kepler. The mathematical step required no small mathematical powers; as appears, when we consider that this was the first example of such a problem, and that the method of limits, under all its forms, was at this time in its infancy, or rather, at its birth. Accordingly, even this step, though much the easiest in the path of deduction, no one before Newton completely executed.

2. Force in different Points of an Orbit.—The inference of the law of the force from Kepler’s two laws concerning the elliptical motion, was a problem quite different from the preceding, and much more difficult; but the dispute with respect to priority in the two propositions was intermingled. Borelli, in 1666, had, as we have [seen], endeavored to reconcile the general form of the orbit with the notion of a central attractive force, by taking centrifugal force into the account; and Hooke, in 1679, had asserted that the result of the law of the inverse square in the force of the earth would be an ellipse,[26] or a curve like an ellipse.[27] But it does not appear that this was any thing more than [401] a conjecture. Halley says[28] that “Hooke, in 1683, told him he had demonstrated all the laws of the celestial motions by the reciprocally duplicate proportion of the force of gravity; but that, being offered forty shillings by Sir Christopher Wren to produce such a demonstration, his answer was, that he had it, but would conceal it for some time, that others, trying and failing, might know how to value it when he should make it public.” Halley, however, truly observes, that after the publication of the demonstration in the Principia, this reason no longer held; and adds, “I have plainly told him, that unless he produce another differing demonstration, and let the world judge of it, neither I nor any one else can believe it.”

[26] Newton’s Letter, Biog. Brit., Hooke, p. 2660.

[27] Birch’s Hist. R. S., Wallis’s Life.

[28] Enc. Brit., Hooke, p. 2660.

Newton allows that Hooke’s assertions in 1679 gave occasion to his investigation on this point of the theory. His demonstration is contained in the second and third Sections of the Principia. He first treats of the general law of central forces in any curve; and then, on account, as he states, of the application to the motion of the heavenly bodies, he treats of the case of force varying inversely as the square of the distance, in a more diffuse manner.

In this, as in the former portion of his discovery, the two steps were, the proposing the heavenly motions as a mechanical problem, and the solving this problem. Borelli and Hooke had certainly made the former step, with considerable distinctness; but the mathematical solution required no common inventive power.

Newton seems to have been much ruffled by Hooke’s speaking slightly of the value of this second step; and is moved in return to deny Hooke’s pretensions with some asperity, and to assert his own. He says, in a letter to Halley, “Borelli did something in it, and wrote modestly; he (Hooke) has done nothing; and yet written in such a way as if he knew, and had sufficiently hinted all but what remained to be determined by the drudgery of calculations and observations; excusing himself from that labor by reason of his other business; whereas he should rather have excused himself by reason of his inability; for it is very plain, by his words, he knew not how to go about it. Now is not this very fine? Mathematicians that find out, settle, and do all the business, must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators and drudges; and another that does nothing but pretend and grasp at all things, must carry away all the inventions, as well of those that were to follow him as of those that [402] went before.” This was written, however, under the influence of some degree of mistake; and in a subsequent letter, Newton says, “Now I understand he was in some respects misrepresented to me, I wish I had spared the postscript to my last,” in which is the passage just quoted. We see, by the melting away of rival claims, the undivided honor which belongs to Newton, as the real discoverer of the proposition now under notice. We may add, that in the sequel of the third Section of the Principia, he has traced its consequences, and solved various problems flowing from it with his usual fertility and beauty of mathematical resource; and has there shown the necessary connection of Kepler’s third law with his first and second.

3. Moon’s Gravity to the Earth.—Though others had considered cosmical forces as governed by the general laws of motion, it does not appear that they had identified such forces with the force of terrestrial gravity. This step in Newton’s discoveries has generally been the most spoken of by superficial thinkers; and a false kind of interest has been attached to it, from the story of its being suggested by the fall of an apple. The popular mind is caught by the character of an eventful narrative which the anecdote gives to this occurrence; and by the antithesis which makes a profound theory appear the result of a trivial accident. How inappropriate is such a view of the matter we shall soon see. The narrative of the progress of Newton’s thoughts, is given by Pemberton (who had it from Newton himself) in his preface to his View of Newton’s Philosophy, and by Voltaire, who had it from Mrs. Conduit, Newton’s niece.[29] “The first thoughts,” we are told, “which gave rise to his Principia, he had when he retired from Cambridge, in 1666, on account of the plague (he was then twenty-four years of age). As he sat alone in a garden, he fell into a speculation on the power of gravity; that as this power is not found sensibly diminished at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can rise, neither at the tops of the loftiest buildings, nor even on the summits of the highest mountains, it appeared to him reasonable to conclude that this power must extend much further than was usually thought: Why not as high as the moon? said he to himself; and if so, her motion must be influenced by it; perhaps she is retained in her orbit thereby.”

[29] Elémens de Phil. de Newton, 3me partie, chap. iii.

The thought of cosmical gravitation was thus distinctly brought into being; and Newton’s superiority here was, that he conceived the [403] celestial motions as distinctly as the motions which took place close to him;—considered them as of the same kind, and applied the same rules to each, without hesitation or obscurity. But so far, this thought was merely a guess: its occurrence showed the activity of the thinker; but to give it any value, it required much more than a “why not?”—a “perhaps.” Accordingly, Newton’s “why not?” was immediately succeeded by his “if so, what then?” His reasoning was, that if gravity reach to the moon, it is probably of the same kind as the central force of the sun, and follows the same rule with respect to the distance. What is this rule? We have already seen that, by calculating from Kepler’s laws, and supposing the orbits to be circles, the rule of the force appears to be the inverse duplicate proportion of the distance; and this, which had been current as a conjecture among the previous generation of mathematicians, Newton had already proved by indisputable reasonings, and was thus prepared to proceed in his train of inquiry. If, then, he went on, pursuing his train of thought, the earth’s gravity extend to the moon, diminishing according to the inverse square of the distance, will it, at the moon’s orbit, be of the proper magnitude for retaining her in her path? Here again came in calculation, and a calculation of extreme interest; for how important and how critical was the decision which depended on the resulting numbers? According to Newton’s calculations, made at this time, the moon by her motion in her orbit, was deflected from the tangent every minute through a space of thirteen feet. But by noticing the space through which bodies would fall in one minute at the earth’s surface, and supposing this to be diminished in the ratio of the inverse square, it appeared that gravity would, at the moon’s orbit, draw a body through more than fifteen feet. The difference seems small, the approximation encouraging, the theory plausible; a man in love with his own fancies would readily have discovered or invented some probable cause of this difference. But Newton acquiesced in it as a disproof of his conjecture, and “laid aside at that time any further thoughts of this matter;” thus resigning a favorite hypothesis, with a candor and openness to conviction not inferior to Kepler, though his notion had been taken up on far stronger and sounder grounds than Kepler dealt in; and without even, so far as we know, Kepler’s regrets and struggles. Nor was this levity or indifference; the idea, though thus laid aside, was not finally condemned and abandoned. When Hooke, in 1679, contradicted Newton on the subject of the curve described by a falling body, and asserted it to be an ellipse, Newton [404] was led to investigate the subject, and was then again conducted, by another road, to the same law of the inverse square of the distance. This naturally turned his thoughts to his former speculations. Was there really no way of explaining the discrepancy which this law gave, when he attempted to reduce the moon’s motion to the action of gravity? A scientific operation then recently completed, gave the explanation at once. He had been mistaken in the magnitude of the earth, and consequently in the distance of the moon, which is determined by measurements of which the earth’s radius is the base. He had taken the common estimate, current among geographers and seamen, that sixty English miles are contained in one degree of latitude. But Picard, in 1670, had measured the length of a certain portion of the meridian in France, with far greater accuracy than had yet been attained and this measure enabled Newton to repeat his calculations with these amended data. We may imagine the strong curiosity which he must have felt as to the result of these calculations. His former conjecture was now found to agree with the phenomena to a remarkable degree of precision. This conclusion, thus coming after long doubts and delays, and falling in with the other results of mechanical calculation for the solar system, gave a stamp from that moment to his opinions, and through him to those of the whole philosophical world.

[2d Ed.] [Dr. Robison (Mechanical Philosophy, p. 288) says that Newton having become a member of the Royal Society, there learned the accurate measurement of the earth by Picard, differing very much from the estimation by which he had made his calculations in 1666. And M. Biot, in his Life of Newton, published in the Biographie Universelle, says, “According to conjecture, about the month of June, 1682, Newton being in London at a meeting of the Royal Society, mention was made of the new measure of a degree of the earth’s surface, recently executed in France by Picard; and great praise was given to the care which had been employed in making this measure exact.”

I had adopted this conjecture as a fact in my first edition; but it has been pointed out by Prof. Rigaud (Historical Essay on the First Publication of the Principia, 1838), that Picard’s measurement was probably well known to the Fellows of the Royal Society as early as 1675, there being an account of the results of it given in the Philosophical Transactions for that year. Newton appears to have discovered the method of determining that a body might describe an ellipse when acted upon by a force residing in the focus, and varying [405] inversely as the square of the distance, in 1679, upon occasion of his correspondence with Hooke. In 1684, at Halley’s request, he returned to the subject, and in February, 1685, there was inserted in the Register of the Royal Society a paper of Newton’s (Isaaci Newtoni Propositiones de Motu) which contained some of the principal Propositions of the first two Books of the Principia. This paper, however, does not contain the Proposition “Lunam gravitare in terram,” nor any of the other propositions of the third Book. The Principia was printed in 1686 and 7, apparently at the expense of Halley. On the 6th of April, 1687, the third Book was presented to the Royal Society.]

It does not appear, I think, that before Newton, philosophers in general had supposed that terrestrial gravity was the very force by which the moon’s motions are produced. Men had, as we have seen, taken up the conception of such forces, and had probably called them gravity: but this was done only to explain, by analogy, what kind of forces they were, just as at other times they compared them with magnetism; and it did not imply that terrestrial gravity was a force which acted in the celestial spaces. After Newton had discovered that this was so, the application of the term “gravity” did undoubtedly convey such a suggestion; but we should err if we inferred from this coincidence of expression that the notion was commonly entertained before him. Thus Huyghens appears to use language which may be mistaken, when he says,[30] that Borelli was of opinion that the primary planets were urged by “gravity” towards the sun, and the satellites towards the primaries. The notion of terrestrial gravity, as being actually a cosmical force, is foreign to all Borelli’s speculations.[31] But Horrox, as early as 1635, appears to have entertained the true view on this subject, although vitiated by Keplerian errors concerning the connection between the rotation of the central body and its effect on the body which revolves about it. Thus he says,[32] that the emanation of the earth carries a projected stone along with the motion of the earth, just in the same way as it carries the moon in her orbit; and that this force is greater on the stone than on the moon, because the distance is less.

[30] Cosmotheoros, l. 2. p. 720.

[31] I have found no instance in which the word is so used by him.

[32] Astronomia Kepleriana defensa et promota, cap. 2. See further on this subject in the [Additions] to this volume.

The Proposition in which Newton has stated the discovery of which we are now speaking, is the fourth of his third Book: “That the moon gravitates to the earth, and by the force of gravity is perpetually [406] deflected from a rectilinear motion, and retained in her orbit.” The proof consists in the numerical calculation, of which he only gives the elements, and points out the method; but we may observe, that no small degree of knowledge of the way in which astronomers had obtained these elements, and judgment in selecting among them, were necessary: thus, the mean distance of the moon had been made as little as fifty-six and a half semidiameters of the earth by Tycho, and as much as sixty-two and a half by Kircher: Newton gives good reasons for adopting sixty-one.

The term “gravity,” and the expression “to gravitate,” which, as we have just seen, Newton uses of the moon, were to receive a still wider application in consequence of his discoveries; but in order to make this extension clearer, we consider it as a separate step. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~

4. Mutual Attraction of all the Celestial Bodies.—If the preceding parts of the discovery of gravitation were comparatively easy to conjecture, and difficult to prove, this was much more the case with the part of which we have now to speak, the attraction of other bodies, besides the central ones, upon the planets and satellites. If the mathematical calculation of the unmixed effect of a central force required transcendent talents, how much must the difficulty be increased, when other influences prevented those first results from being accurately verified, while the deviations from accuracy were far more complex than the original action! If it had not been that these deviations, though surprisingly numerous and complicated in their nature, were very small in their quantity, it would have been impossible for the intellect of man to deal with the subject; as it was, the struggle with its difficulties is even now a matter of wonder.

The conjecture that there is some mutual action of the planets, had been put forth by Hooke in his Attempt to prove the Motion of the Earth (1674). It followed, he said, from his doctrine, that not only the sun and moon act upon the course and motion of the earth, but that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, have also, by their attractive power, a considerable influence upon the motion of the earth, and the earth in like manner powerfully affects the motions of those bodies. And Borelli, in attempting to form “theories” of the satellites of Jupiter, had seen, though dimly and confusedly, the probability that the sun would disturb the motions of these bodies. Thus he says (cap. 14), “How can we believe that the Medicean globes are not, like other planets, impelled with a greater velocity when they approach the sun: and thus they are acted upon by two moving forces, one of [407] which produces their proper revolution about Jupiter, the other regulates their motion round the sun.” And in another place (cap. 20), he attempts to show an effect of this principle upon the inclination of the orbit; though, as might be expected, without any real result.

The case which most obviously suggests the notion that the sun exerts a power to disturb the motions of secondary planets about primary ones, might seem to be our own moon; for the great inequalities which had hitherto been discovered, had all, except the first, or elliptical anomaly, a reference to the position of the sun. Nevertheless, I do not know that any one had attempted thus to explain the curiously irregular course of the earth’s attendant. To calculate, from the disturbing agency, the amount of the irregularities, was a problem which could not, at any former period, have been dreamt of as likely to be at any time within the verge of human power.

Newton both made the step of inferring that there were such forces, and, to a very great extent, calculated the effects of them. The inference is made on mechanical principles, in the sixth Theorem of the third Book of the Principia;—that the moon is attracted by the sun, as the earth is;—that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn are attracted as the primaries are; in the same manner, and with the same forces. If this were not so, it is shown that these attendant bodies could not accompany the principal ones in the regular manner in which they do. All those bodies at equal distances from the sun would be equally attracted.

But the complexity which must occur in tracing the results of this principle will easily be seen. The satellite and the primary, though nearly at the same distance, and in the same direction, from the sun, are not exactly so. Moreover the difference of the distances and of the directions is perpetually changing; and if the motion of the satellite be elliptical, the cycle of change is long and intricate: on this account alone the effects of the sun’s action will inevitably follow cycles as long and as perplexed as those of the positions. But on another account they will be still more complicated; for in the continued action of a force, the effect which takes place at first, modifies and alters the effect afterwards. The result at any moment is the sum of the results in preceding instants: and since the terms, in this series of instantaneous effects, follow very complex rules, the sums of such series will be, it might be expected, utterly incapable of being reduced to any manageable degree of simplicity.

It certainly does not appear that any one but Newton could make [408] any impression on this problem, or course of problems. No one for sixty years after the publication of the Principia, and, with Newton’s methods, no one up to the present day, had added any thing of any value to his deductions. We know that he calculated all the principal lunar inequalities; in many of the cases, he has given us his processes; in others, only his results. But who has presented, in his beautiful geometry, or deduced from his simple principles, any of the inequalities which he left untouched? The ponderous instrument of synthesis, so effective in his hands, has never since been grasped by one who could use it for such purposes; and we gaze at it with admiring curiosity, as on some gigantic implement of war, which stands idle among the memorials of ancient days, and makes us wonder what manner of man he was who could wield as a weapon what we can hardly lift as a burden.

It is not necessary to point out in detail the sagacity and skill which mark this part of the Principia. The mode in which the author obtains the effect of a disturbing force in producing a motion of the apse of an elliptical orbit (the ninth Section of the first Book), has always been admired for its ingenuity and elegance. The general statement of the nature of the principal inequalities produced by the sun in the motion of a satellite, given in the sixty-sixth Proposition, is, even yet, one of the best explanations of such action; and the calculations of the quantity of the effects in the third Book, for instance, the variation of the moon, the motion of the nodes and its inequalities, the change of inclination of the orbit,—are full of beautiful and efficacious artifices. But Newton’s inventive faculty was exercised to an extent greater than these published investigations show. In several cases he has suppressed the demonstration of his method, and given us the result only; either from haste or from mere weariness, which might well overtake one who, while he was struggling with facts and numbers, with difficulties of conception and practice, was aiming also at that geometrical elegance of exposition, which he considered as alone fit for the public eye. Thus, in stating the effect of the eccentricity of the moon’s orbit upon the motion of the apogee, he says,[33] “The computations, as too intricate and embarrassed with approximations, I do not choose to introduce.”

[33] Schol. to Prop. 35, first edit.

The computations of the theoretical motion of the moon being thus difficult, and its irregularities numerous and complex, we may ask [409] whether Newton’s reasoning was sufficient to establish this part of his theory; namely, that her actual motions arise from her gravitation to the sun. And to this we may reply, that it was sufficient for that purpose,—since it showed that, from Newton’s hypothesis, inequalities must result, following the laws which the moon’s inequalities were known to follow;—since the amount of the inequalities given by the theory agreed nearly with the rules which astronomers had collected from observation;—and since, by the very intricacy of the calculation, it was rendered probable, that the first results might be somewhat inaccurate, and thus might give rise to the still remaining differences between the calculations and the facts. A Progression of the Apogee; a Regression of the Nodes; and, besides the Elliptical, or first Inequality, an inequality, following the law of the Evection, or second inequality discovered by Ptolemy; another, following the law of the Variation discovered by Tycho;—were pointed out in the first edition of the Principia, as the consequences of the theory. Moreover, the quantities of these inequalities were calculated and compared with observation with the utmost confidence, and the agreement in most instances was striking. The Variation agreed with Halley’s recent observations within a minute of a degree.[34] The Mean Motion of the Nodes in a year agreed within less than one-hundredth of the whole.[35] The Equation of the Motion of the Nodes also agreed well.[36] The Inclination of the Plane of the Orbit to the ecliptic, and its changes, according to the different situations of the nodes, likewise agreed.[37] The Evection has been already noticed as encumbered with peculiar difficulties: here the accordance was less close. The Difference of the daily progress of the Apogee in syzygy, and its daily Regress in Quadratures, is, Newton says, “4¼ minutes by the Tables, 6⅔ by our calculation.” He boldly adds, “I suspect this difference to be due to the fault of the Tables.” In the second edition (1711) he added the calculation of several other inequalities, as the Annual Equation, also discovered by Tycho; and he compared them with more recent observations made by Flamsteed at Greenwich; but even in what has already been stated, it must be allowed that there is a wonderful accordance of theory with phenomena, both being very complex in the rules which they educe.

[34] B. iii. Prop. 29.

[35] Prop. 32.

[36] Prop. 33.

[37] Prop. 35.

The same theory which gave these Inequalities in the motion of the Moon produced by the disturbing force of the sun, gave also [410] corresponding Inequalities in the motions of the Satellites of other planets, arising from the same cause; and likewise pointed out the necessary existence of irregularities in the motions of the Planets arising from their mutual attraction. Newton gave propositions by which the Irregularities of the motion of Jupiter’s moons might be deduced from those of our own;[38] and it was shown that the motions of their nodes would be slow by theory, as Flamsteed had found it to be by observation.[39] But Newton did not attempt to calculate the effect of the mutual action of the planets, though he observes, that in the case of Jupiter and Saturn this effect is too considerable to be neglected;[40] and he notices in the second edition,[41] that it follows from the theory of gravity, that the aphelia of Mercury, Venus, the Earth, and Mars, slightly progress.

[38] B. i. Prop. 66.

[39] B. iii. Prop. 23.

[40] B. iii. Prop. 13.

[41] Scholium to Prop. 14. B. iii.

In one celebrated instance, indeed, the deviation of the theory of the Principia from observation was wider, and more difficult to explain; and as this deviation for a time resisted the analysis of Euler and Clairaut, as it had resisted the synthesis of Newton, it at one period staggered the faith of mathematicians in the exactness of the law of the inverse square of the distance. I speak of the Motion of the Moon’s Apogee, a problem which has [already] been referred to; and in which Newton’s method, and all the methods which could be devised for some time afterwards, gave only half the observed motion; a circumstance which arose, as was discovered by Clairaut in 1750, from the insufficiency of the method of approximation. Newton does not attempt to conceal this discrepancy. After calculating what the motion of apse would be, upon the assumption of a disturbing force of the same amount as that which the sun exerts on the moon, he simply says,[42] “the apse of the moon moves about twice as fast.”

[42] B. i. Prop. 44, second edit. There is reason to believe, however, that Newton had, in his unpublished calculations, rectified this discrepancy.

The difficulty of doing what Newton did in this branch of the subject, and the powers it must have required, may be judged of from what has already been stated;—that no one, with his methods, has yet been able to add any thing to his labors: few have undertaken to illustrate what he has written, and no great number have understood it throughout. The extreme complication of the forces, and of the conditions under which they act, makes the subject by far the most thorny walk of mathematics. It is necessary to resolve the action [411] into many elements, such as can be separated; to invent artifices for dealing with each of these; and then to recompound the laws thus obtained into one common conception. The moon’s motion cannot be conceived without comprehending a scheme more complex than the Ptolemaic epicycles and eccentrics in their worst form; and the component parts of the system are not, in this instance, mere geometrical ideas, requiring only a distinct apprehension of relations of space in order to hold them securely; they are the foundations of mechanical notions, and require to be grasped so that we can apply to them sound mechanical reasonings. Newton’s successors, in the next generation, abandoned the hope of imitating him in this intense mental effort; they gave the subject over to the operation of algebraical reasoning, in which symbols think for us, without our dwelling constantly upon their meaning, and obtain for us the consequences which result from the relations of space and the laws of force, however complicated be the conditions under which they are combined. Even Newton’s countrymen, though they were long before they applied themselves to the method thus opposed to his, did not produce any thing which showed that they had mastered, or could retrace, the Newtonian investigations.

Thus the Problem of Three Bodies,[43] treated geometrically, belongs exclusively to Newton; and the proofs of the mutual action of the sun, planets, and satellites, which depend upon such reasoning, could not be discovered by any one but him.

[43] See the history of the Problem of Three Bodies, ante, in Book vi. Chap. vi. [Sect. 7.]

But we have not yet done with his achievements on this subject; for some of the most remarkable and beautiful of the reasonings which he connected with this problem, belong to the next step of his generalization.

5. Mutual Attraction of all Particles of Matter.—That all the parts of the universe are drawn and held together by love, or harmony, or some affection to which, among other names, that of attraction may have been given, is an assertion which may very possibly have been made at various times, by speculators writing at random, and taking their chance of meaning and truth. The authors of such casual dogmas have generally nothing accurate or substantial, either in their conception of the general proposition, or in their reference to examples of it; and, therefore, their doctrines are no concern of ours at present. But among those who were really the first to think of the mutual [412] attraction of matter, we cannot help noticing Francis Bacon; for his notions were so far from being chargeable with the looseness and indistinctness to which we have alluded, that he proposed an experiment[44] which was to decide whether the facts were so or not;—whether the gravity of bodies to the earth arose from an attraction of the parts of matter towards each other, or was a tendency towards the centre of the earth. And this experiment is, even to this day, one of the best which can be devised, in order to exhibit the universal gravitation of matter: it consists in the comparison of the rate of going of a clock in a deep mine, and on a high place. Huyghens, in his book De Causâ Gravitatis, published in 1690, showed that the earth would have an oblate form, in consequence of the action of the centrifugal force; but his reasoning does not suppose gravity to arise from the mutual attraction of the parts of the earth. The apparent influence of the moon upon the tides had long been remarked; but no one had made any progress in truly explaining the mechanism of this influence; and all the analogies to which reference had been made, on this and similar subjects, as magnetic and other attractions, were rather delusive than illustrative, since they represented the attraction as something peculiar in particular bodies, depending upon the nature of each body.

[44] Nov. Org. Lib. ii. Aph. 36.

That all such forces, cosmical and terrestrial, were the same single force, and that this was nothing more than the insensible attraction which subsists between one stone and another, was a conception equally bold and grand; and would have been an incomprehensible thought, if the views which we have already explained had not prepared the mind for it. But the preceding steps having disclosed, between all the bodies of the universe, forces of the same kind as those which produce the weight of bodies at the earth, and, therefore, such as exist in every particle of terrestrial matter; it became an obvious question, whether such forces did not also belong to all particles of planetary matter, and whether this was not, in fact, the whole account of the forces of the solar system. But, supposing this conjecture to be thus suggested, how formidable, on first appearance at least, was the undertaking of verifying it! For if this be so, every finite mass of matter exerts forces which are the result of the infinitely numerous forces of its particles, these forces acting in different directions. It does not appear, at first sight, that the law by which the force is related to the distance, will be the same for the particles as it is for the masses; and, in reality, it [413] is not so, except in special cases. And, again, in the instance of any effect produced by the force of a body, how are we to know whether the force resides in the whole mass as a unit, or in the separate particles? We may reason, as Newton does,[45] that the rule which proves gravity to belong universally to the planets, proves it also to belong to their parts; but the mind will not be satisfied with this extension of the rule, except we can find decisive instances, and calculate the effects of both suppositions, under the appropriate conditions. Accordingly, Newton had to solve a new series of problems suggested by this inquiry; and this he did.

[45] Princip. B. iii. Prop. 7.

These solutions are no less remarkable for the mathematical power which they exhibit, than the other parts of the Principia. The propositions in which it is shown that the law of the inverse square for the particles gives the same law for spherical masses, have that kind of beauty which might well have justified their being published for their mathematical elegance alone, even if they had not applied to any real case. Great ingenuity is also employed in other instances, as in the case of spheroids of small eccentricity. And when the amount of the mechanical action of masses of various forms has thus been assigned, the sagacity shown in tracing the results of such action in the solar system is truly admirable; not only the general nature of the effect being pointed out, but its quantity calculated. I speak in particular of the reasonings concerning the Figure of the Earth, the Tides, the Precession of the Equinoxes, the Regression of the Nodes of a ring such as Saturn’s; and of some effects which, at that time, had not been ascertained even as facts of observation; for instance, the difference of gravity in different latitudes, and the Nutation of the earth’s axis. It is true, that in most of these cases, Newton’s process could be considered only as a rude approximation. In one (the Precession) he committed an error, and in all, his means of calculation were insufficient. Indeed these are much more difficult investigations than the Problem of Three Bodies, in which three points act on each other by explicit laws. Up to this day, the resources of modern analysis have been employed upon some of them with very partial success; and the facts, in all of them, required to be accurately ascertained and measured, a process which is not completed even now. Nevertheless the form and nature of the conclusions which Newton did obtain, were such as to inspire a strong confidence in the competency of his theory to explain [414] all such phenomena as have been spoken of. We shall [afterwards] have to speak of the labors, undertaken in order to examine the phenomena more exactly, to which the theory gave occasion.

Thus, then, the theory of the universal mutual gravitation of all the particles of matter, according to the law of the inverse square of the distances, was conceived, its consequences calculated, and its results shown to agree with phenomena. It was found that this theory took up all the facts of astronomy as far as they had hitherto been ascertained; while it pointed out an interminable vista of new facts, too minute or too complex for observation alone to disentangle, but capable of being detected when theory had pointed out their laws, and of being used as criteria or confirmations of the truth of the doctrine. For the same reasoning which explained the evection, variation, and annual equation of the moon, showed that there must be many other inequalities besides these; since these resulted from approximate methods of calculation, in which small quantities were neglected. And it was known that, in fact, the inequalities hitherto detected by astronomers did not give the place of the moon with satisfactory accuracy; so that there was room, among these hitherto untractable irregularities, for the additional results of the theory. To work out this comparison was the employment of the succeeding century; but Newton began it. Thus, at the end of the proposition in which he asserts,[46] that “all the lunar motions and their irregularities follow from the principles here stated,” he makes the observation which we have just made; and gives, as examples, the different motions of the apogee and nodes, the difference of the change of the eccentricity, and the difference of the moon’s variation, according to the different distances of the sun. “But this inequality,” he says, “in astronomical calculations, is usually referred to the prosthaphæresis of the moon, and confounded with it.”

[46] B. iii. Prop. 22.

Reflections on the Discovery.—Such, then, is the great Newtonian Induction of Universal Gravitation, and such its history. It is indisputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever made, whether we look at the advance which it involved, the extent of the truth disclosed, or the fundamental and satisfactory nature of this truth. As to the first point, we may observe that any one of the five steps into which we have separated the doctrine, would, of itself, have been considered as an important advance;—would have conferred distinction on the persons who made it, and the time to which it belonged. All [415] the five steps made at once, formed not a leap, but a flight,—not an improvement merely, but a metamorphosis,—not an epoch, but a termination. Astronomy passed at once from its boyhood to mature manhood. Again, with regard to the extent of the truth, we obtain as wide a generalization as our physical knowledge admits, when we learn that every particle of matter, in all times, places, and circumstances, attracts every other particle in the universe by one common law of action. And by saying that the truth was of a fundamental and satisfactory nature, I mean that it assigned, not a rule merely, but a cause, for the heavenly motions; and that kind of cause which most eminently and peculiarly we distinctly and thoroughly conceive, namely, mechanical force. Kepler’s laws were merely formal rules, governing the celestial motions according to the relations of space, time, and number; Newton’s was a causal law, referring these motions to mechanical reasons. It is no doubt conceivable that future discoveries may both extend and further explain Newton’s doctrines;—may make gravitation a case of some wider law, and may disclose something of the mode in which it operates; questions with which Newton himself struggled. But, in the mean time, few persons will dispute, that both in generality and profundity, both in width and depth, Newton’s theory is altogether without a rival or neighbor.[47]

[47] The value and nature of this step have long been generally acknowledged wherever science is cultivated. Yet it would appear that there is, in one part of Europe, a school of philosophers who contest the merit of this part of Newton’s discoveries. “Kepler,” says a celebrated German metaphysician,* “discovered the laws of free motion; a discovery of immortal glory. It has since been the fashion to say that Newton first found out the proof of these rules. It has seldom happened that the glory of the first discoverer has been more unjustly transferred to another person.” It may appear strange that any one in the present day should hold such language; but if we examine the reasons which this author gives, they will be found, I think, to amount to this: that his mind is in the condition in which Kepler’s was; and that the whole range of mechanical ideas and modes of conception which made the transition from Kepler and Newton possible, are extraneous to the domain of his philosophy. Even this author, however, if I understand him rightly, recognizes Newton as the author of the doctrine of Perturbations.
I have given a further account of these views, in a Memoir On Hegel’s Criticism of Newton’s Principia. Cambridge Transactions, 1849.

* Hegel, Encyclopædia, § 270.

The requisite conditions of such a discovery in the mind of its author were, in this as in other cases, the idea, and its comparison with facts;—the conception of the law, and the moulding this conception in such a form as to correspond with known realities. The idea of mechanical [416] force as the cause of the celestial motions, had, as we have seen, been for some time growing up in men’s minds; had gone on becoming more distinct and more general; and had, in some persons, approached the form in which it was entertained by Newton. Still, in the mere conception of universal gravitation, Newton must have gone far beyond his predecessors and contemporaries, both in generality and distinctness; and in the inventiveness and sagacity with which he traced the consequences of this conception, he was, as we have shown, without a rival, and almost without a second. As to the facts which he had to include in his law, they had been accumulating from the very birth of astronomy; but those which he had more peculiarly to take hold of were the facts of the planetary motions as given by Kepler, and those of the moon’s motions as given by Tycho Brahe and Jeremy Horrox.

We find here occasion to make a remark which is important in its bearing on the nature of progressive science. What Newton thus used and referred to as facts, were the laws which his predecessors had established. What Kepler and Horrox had put forth as “theories,” were now established truths, fit to be used in the construction of other theories. It is in this manner that one theory is built upon another;—that we rise from particulars to generals, and from one generalization to another;—that we have, in short, successive steps of induction. As Newton’s laws assumed Kepler’s, Kepler’s laws assumed as facts the results of the planetary theory of Ptolemy; and thus the theories of each generation in the scientific world are (when thoroughly verified and established,) the facts of the next generation. Newton’s theory is the circle of generalization which includes all the others;—the highest point of the inductive ascent;—the catastrophe of the philosophic drama to which Plato had prologized;—the point to which men’s minds had been journeying for two thousand years.

Character of Newton.—It is not easy to anatomize the constitution and the operations of the mind which makes such an advance in knowledge. Yet we may observe that there must exist in it, in an eminent degree, the elements which compose the mathematical talent. It must possess distinctness of intuition, tenacity and facility in tracing logical connection, fertility of invention, and a strong tendency to generalization. It is easy to discover indications of these characteristics in Newton. The distinctness of his intuitions of space, and we may add of force also, was seen in the amusements of his youth; in his constructing clocks and mills, carts and dials, as well as the facility with which he [417] mastered geometry. This fondness for handicraft employments, and for making models and machines, appears to be a common prelude of excellence in physical science;[48] probably on this very account, that it arises from the distinctness of intuitive power with which the child conceives the shapes and the working of such material combinations. Newton’s inventive power appears in the number and variety of the mathematical artifices and combinations which he devised, and of which his books are full. If we conceive the operation of the inventive faculty in the only way in which it appears possible to conceive it;—that while some hidden source supplies a rapid stream of possible suggestions, the mind is on the watch to seize and detain any one of these which will suit the case in hand, allowing the rest to pass by and be forgotten;—we shall see what extraordinary fertility of mind is implied by so many successful efforts; what an innumerable host of thoughts must have been produced, to supply so many that deserved to be selected. And since the selection is performed by tracing the consequences of each suggestion, so as to compare them with the requisite conditions, we see also what rapidity and certainty in drawing conclusions the mind must possess as a talent, and what watchfulness and patience as a habit.

[48] As in Galileo, Hooke, Huyghens, and others.

The hidden fountain of our unbidden thoughts is for us a mystery; and we have, in our consciousness, no standard by which we can measure our own talents; but our acts and habits are something of which we are conscious; and we can understand, therefore, how it was that Newton could not admit that there was any difference between himself and other men, except in his possession of such habits as we have mentioned, perseverance and vigilance. When he was asked how he made his discoveries, he answered, “by always thinking about them;” and at another time he declared that if he had done any thing, it was due to nothing but industry and patient thought: “I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” No better account can be given of the nature of the mental effort which gives to the philosopher the full benefit of his powers; but the natural powers of men’s minds are not on that account the less different. There are many who might wait through ages of darkness without being visited by any dawn.

The habit to which Newton thus, in some sense, owed his [418] discoveries, this constant attention to the rising thought, and development of its results in every direction, necessarily engaged and absorbed his spirit, and made him inattentive and almost insensible to external impressions and common impulses. The stories which are told of his extreme absence of mind, probably refer to the two years during which he was composing his Principia, and thus following out a train of reasoning the most fertile, the most complex, and the most important, which any philosopher had ever had to deal with. The magnificent and striking questions which, during this period, he must have had daily rising before him; the perpetual succession of difficult problems of which the solution was necessary to his great object; may well have entirely occupied and possessed him. “He existed only to calculate and to think.”[49] Often, lost in meditation, he knew not what he did, and his mind appeared to have quite forgotten its connection with the body. His servant reported that, on rising in a morning, he frequently sat a large portion of the day, half-dressed, on the side of his bed and that his meals waited on the table for hours before he came to take them. Even with his transcendent powers, to do what he did was almost irreconcilable with the common conditions of human life; and required the utmost devotion of thought, energy of effort, and steadiness of will—the strongest character, as well as the highest endowments, which belong to man.

[49] Biot.

Newton has been so universally considered as the greatest example of a natural philosopher, that his moral qualities, as well as his intellect, have been referred to as models of the philosophical character; and those who love to think that great talents are naturally associated with virtue, have always dwelt with pleasure upon the views given of Newton by his contemporaries; for they have uniformly represented him as candid and humble, mild and good. We may take as an example of the impressions prevalent about him in his own time, the expressions of Thomson, in the Poem on his Death.[50] [419]

Say ye who best can tell, ye happy few,
Who saw him in the softest lights of life,
All unwithheld, indulging to his friends
The vast unborrowed treasures of his mind,
Oh, speak the wondrous man! how mild, how calm
How greatly humble, how divinely good,
How firm established on eternal truth!
Fervent in doing well, with every nerve
Still pressing on, forgetful of the past,
And panting for perfection; far above
Those little cares and visionary joys
That so perplex the fond impassioned heart
Of ever-cheated, ever-trusting man.

[50] In the same strain we find the general voice of the time. For instance, one of Loggan’s “Views of Cambridge” is dedicated “Isaaco Newtono . . Mathematico, Physico, Chymico consummatissimo; nec minus suavitate morum et candore animi . . . spectabili.”
In opposition to the general current of such testimony, we have the complaints of Flamsteed, who ascribes to Newton angry language and harsh conduct in the matter of the publication of the Greenwich Observations, and of Whiston. Yet even Flamsteed speaks well of his general disposition. Whiston was himself so weak and prejudiced that his testimony is worth very little.

[2d Ed.] [In the first edition of the Principia, published in 1687, Newton showed that the nature of all the then known inequalities of the moon, and in some cases, their quantities, might be deduced from the principles which he laid down but the determination of the amount and law of most of the inequalities was deferred to a more favorable opportunity, when he might be furnished with better astronomical observations. Such observations as he needed for this purpose had been made by Flamsteed, and for these he applied, representing how much value their use would add to the observations. “If,” he says, in 1694, “you publish them without such a theory to recommend them, they will only be thrown into the heap of the observations of former astronomers, till somebody shall arise that by perfecting the theory of the moon shall discover your observations to be exacter than the rest; but when that shall be, God knows: I fear, not in your lifetime, if I should die before it is done. For I find this theory so very intricate, and the theory of gravity so necessary to it, that I am satisfied it will never be perfected but by somebody who understands the theory of gravity as well, or better than I do.” He obtained from Flamsteed the lunar observations for which he applied, and by using these he framed the Theory of the Moon which is given as his in David Gregory’s Astronomiæ Elementa.[51] He also obtained from Flamsteed the diameters of the planets as observed at various times, and the greatest elongation of Jupiter’s Satellites, both of which, Flamsteed says, he made use of in his Principia.

[51] In the Preface to a Treatise on Dynamics, Part i., published in 1836, I have endeavored to show that Newton’s modes of determining several of the lunar inequalities admitted of an accuracy not very inferior to the modern analytical methods.

Newton, in his letters to Flamsteed in 1694 and 5, acknowledges this service.[52]]

[52] The quarrel on the subject of the publication of Flamsteed’s Observations took place at a later period. Flamsteed wished to have his Observations printed complete and entire. Halley, who, under the authority of Newton and others, had the management of the printing, made many alterations and omissions, which Flamsteed considered as deforming and spoiling the work. The advantages of publishing a complete series of observations, now generally understood, were not then known to astronomers in general, though well known to Flamsteed, and earnestly insisted upon in his remonstrances. The result was that Flamsteed published his Observations at his own expense, and finally obtained permission to destroy the copies printed by Halley, which he did. In 1726, after Flamsteed’s death, his widow applied to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, requesting that the volume printed by Halley might be removed out of the Bodleian Library, where it exists, as being “nothing more than an erroneous abridgment of Mr. Flamsteed’s works,” and unfit to see the light. [420]

CHAPTER III.
Sequel to the Epoch of Newton.—Reception of the Newtonian Theory.

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Sect. 1.—General Remarks.

THE doctrine of universal gravitation, like other great steps in science, required a certain time to make its way into men’s minds; and had to be confirmed, illustrated, and completed, by the labors of succeeding philosophers. As the discovery itself was great beyond former example, the features of the natural sequel to the discovery were also on a gigantic scale; and many vast and laborious trains of research, each of which might, in itself, be considered as forming a wide science, and several of which have occupied many profound and zealous inquirers from that time to our own day, come before us as parts only of the verification of Newton’s Theory. Almost every thing that has been done, and is doing, in astronomy, falls inevitably under this description; and it is only when the astronomer travels to the very limits of his vast field of labor, that he falls in with phenomena which do not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Newtonian legislation. We must give some account of the events of this part of the history of astronomy; but our narrative must necessarily be extremely brief and imperfect; for the subject is most large and copious, and our limits are fixed and narrow. We have here to do with the history of discoveries, only so far as it illustrates their philosophy. And though the [421] astronomical discoveries of the last century are by no means poor, even in interest of this kind, the generalizations which they involve are far less important for our object, in consequence of being included in a previous generalization. Newton shines out so brightly, that all who follow seem faint and dim. It is not precisely the case which the poet describes—

As in a theatre the eyes of men,
After some well-graced actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious:

but our eyes are at least less intently bent on the astronomers who succeeded, and we attend to their communications with less curiosity, because we know the end, if not the course of their story; we know that their speeches have all closed with Newton’s sublime declaration, asserted in some new form.

Still, however, the account of the verification and extension of any great discovery is a highly important part of its history. In this instance it is most important; both from the weight and dignity of the theory concerned, and the ingenuity and extent of the methods employed: and, of course, so long as the Newtonian theory still required verification, the question of the truth or falsehood of such a grand system of doctrines could not but excite the most intense curiosity. In what I have said, I am very far from wishing to depreciate the value of the achievements of modern astronomers, but it is essential to my purpose to mark the subordination of narrower to wider truths—the different character and import of the labors of those who come before and after the promulgation of a master-truth. With this warning I now proceed to my narrative.

Sect. 2.—Reception of the Newtonian Theory in England.

There appears to be a popular persuasion that great discoveries are usually received with a prejudiced and contentious opposition, and the authors of them neglected or persecuted. The reverse of this was certainly the case in England with regard to the discoveries of Newton. As we have already seen, even before they were published, they were proclaimed by Halley to be something of transcendent value; and from the moment of their appearance, they rapidly made their way from one class of thinkers to another, nearly as fast as the nature of men’s intellectual capacity allows. Halley, Wren, and all the leading [422] members of the Royal Society, appear to have embraced the system immediately and zealously. Men whose pursuits had lain rather in literature than in science, and who had not the knowledge and habits of mind which the strict study of the system required, adopted, on the credit of their mathematical friends, the highest estimation of the Principia, and a strong regard for its author, as Evelyn, Locke, and Pepys. Only five years after the publication, the principles of the work were referred to from the pulpit, as so incontestably proved that they might be made the basis of a theological argument. This was done by Dr. Bentley, when he preached the Boyle’s Lectures in London, in 1692. Newton himself, from the time when his work appeared, is never mentioned except in terms of profound admiration; as, for instance, when he is called by Dr. Bentley, in his sermon,[53] “That very excellent and divine theorist, Mr. Isaac Newton.” It appears to have been soon suggested, that the Government ought to provide in some way for a person who was so great an honor to the nation. Some delay took place with regard to this; but, in 1695, his friend Mr. Montague, afterwards Earl of Halifax, at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer, made him Warden of the Mint; and in 1699, he succeeded to the higher office of Master of the Mint, a situation worth £1200 or £1500 a year, which he filled to the end of his life. In 1703, he became President of the Royal Society, and was annually re-elected to this office during the remaining twenty-five years of his life. In 1705, he was knighted in the Master’s Lodge, at Trinity College, by Queen Anne, then on a visit to the University of Cambridge. After the accession of George the First, Newton’s conversation was frequently sought by the Princess, afterwards Queen Caroline, who had a taste for speculative studies, and was often heard to declare in public, that she thought herself fortunate in living at a time which enabled her to enjoy the society of so great a genius. His fame, and the respect paid him, went on increasing to the end of his life; and when, in 1727, full of years and glory, his earthly career was ended, his death was mourned as a national calamity, with the forms usually confined to royalty. His body lay in state in the Jerusalem chamber; his pall was borne by the first nobles of the land and his earthly remains were deposited in the centre of Westminster Abbey, in the midst of the memorials of the greatest and wisest men whom England has produced.

[53] Serm. vii. 221.

It cannot be superfluous to say a word or two on the reception of [423] his philosophy in the universities of England. These are often represented as places where bigotry and ignorance resist, as long as it is possible to resist, the invasion of new truths. We cannot doubt that such opinions have prevailed extensively, when we find an intelligent and generally temperate writer, like the late Professor Playfair of Edinburgh, so far possessed by them, as to be incapable of seeing, or interpreting, in any other way, any facts respecting Oxford and Cambridge. Yet, notwithstanding these opinions, it will be found that, in the English universities, new views, whether in science or in other subjects, have been introduced as soon as they were clearly established;—that they have been diffused from the few to the many more rapidly there than elsewhere occurs;—and that from these points, the light of newly-discovered truths has most usually spread over the land. In most instances undoubtedly there has been something of a struggle, on such occasions, between the old and the new opinions. Few men’s minds can at once shake off a familiar and consistent system of doctrines, and adopt a novel and strange set of principles as soon as presented; but all can see that one change produces many, and that change, in itself, is a source of inconvenience and danger. In the case of the admission of the Newtonian opinions into Cambridge and Oxford, however, there are no traces even of a struggle. Cartesianism had never struck its roots deep in this country; that is, the peculiar hypotheses of Descartes. The Cartesian books, such, for instance, as that of Rohault, were indeed in use; and with good reason, for they contained by far the best treatises on most of the physical sciences, such as Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Formal Astronomy, which could then be found. But I do not conceive that the Vortices were ever dwelt upon as a matter of importance in our academic teaching. At any rate, if they were brought among us, they were soon dissipated. Newton’s College, and his University, exulted in his fame, and did their utmost to honor and aid him. He was exempted by the king from the obligation of taking orders, under which the fellows of Trinity College in general are; by his college he was relieved from all offices which might interfere, however slightly, with his studious employments, though he resided within the walls of the society thirty-five years, almost without the interruption of a month.[54] By the University he was elected their representative in parliament in 1688, [424] and again in 1701; and though he was rejected in the dissolution of 1705, those who opposed him acknowledged him[55] to be “the glory of the University and nation,” but considered the question as a political one, and Newton as sent “to tempt them from their duty, by the great and just veneration they had for him.” Instruments and other memorials, valued because they belonged to him, are still preserved in his college, along with the tradition of the chambers which he occupied.

[54] His name is nowhere found on the college-books, as appointed to any of the offices which usually pass down the list of resident fellows in rotation. This might be owing in part, however, to his being Lucasian Professor. The constancy of his residence in college appears from the exit and redit book of that time, which is still preserved.

[55] A pamphlet by Styan Thurlby.

The most active and powerful minds at Cambridge became at once disciples and followers of Newton. Samuel Clarke, afterwards his friend, defended in the public schools a thesis taken from his philosophy, as early as 1694; and in 1697 published an edition of Rohault’s Physics, with notes, in which Newton is frequently referred to with expressions of profound respect, though the leading doctrines of the Principia are not introduced till a later edition, in 1703. In 1699, Bentley, whom we have already mentioned as a Newtonian, became Master of Trinity College; and in the same year, Whiston, another of Newton’s disciples, was appointed his deputy as professor of mathematics. Whiston delivered the Newtonian doctrines, both from the professor’s chair, and in works written for the use of the University; yet it is remarkable that a taunt respecting the late introduction of the Newtonian system into the Cambridge course of education, has been founded on some peevish expressions which he uses in his Memoirs, written at a period when, having incurred expulsion from his professorship and the University, he was naturally querulous and jaundiced in his views. In 1709–10, Dr. Laughton, who was tutor in Clare Hall, procured himself to be appointed moderator of the University disputations, in order to promote the diffusion of the new mathematical doctrines. By this time the first edition of the Principia was become rare, and fetched a great price. Bentley urged Newton to publish a new one; and Cotes, by far the first, at that time, of the mathematicians of Cambridge, undertook to superintend the printing, and the edition was accordingly published in 1713.

[2d Ed.] [I perceive that my accomplished German translator, Littrow, has incautiously copied the insinuations of some modern writers to the effect that Clarke’s reference to Newton, in his Edition of Rohault’s Physics, was a mode of introducing Newtonian doctrines covertly, when it was not allowed him to introduce such novelties [425] openly. I am quite sure that any one who looks into this matter will see that this supposition of any unwillingness at Cambridge to receive Newton’s doctrine is quite absurd, and can prove nothing but the intense prejudices of those who maintain such an opinion. Newton received and held his professorship amid the unexampled admiration of all contemporary members of the University. Whiston, who is sometimes brought as an evidence against Cambridge on this point, says, “I with immense pains set myself with the utmost zeal to the study of Sir Isaac Newton’s wonderful discoveries in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one or two of which lectures I had heard him read in the public schools, though I understood them not at the time.” As to Rohault’s Physics, it really did contain the best mechanical philosophy of the time;—the doctrines which were held by Descartes in common with Galileo, and with all the sound mathematicians who succeeded them. Nor does it look like any great antipathy to novelty in the University of Cambridge, that this book, which was quite as novel in its doctrines as Newton’s Principia, and which had only been published at Paris in 1671, had obtained a firm hold on the University in less than twenty years. Nor is there any attempt made in Clarke’s notes to conceal the novelty of Newton’s discoveries, but on the contrary, admiration is claimed for them as new.

The promptitude with which the Mathematicians of the University of Cambridge adopted the best parts of the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, and the greater philosophy of Newton, in the seventeenth century, has been paralleled in our own times, in the promptitude with which they have adopted and followed into their consequences the Mathematical Theory of Heat of Fourier and Laplace, and the Undulatory Theory of Light of Young and Fresnel.

In Newton’s College, we possess, besides the memorials of him mentioned above (which include two locks of his silver-white hair), a paper in his own handwriting, describing the preparatory reading which was necessary in order that our College students might be able to read the Principia. I have printed this paper in the Preface to my Edition of the First Three Sections of the Principia in the original Latin (1846).

Bentley, who had expressed his admiration for Newton in his Boyle’s Lectures in 1692, was made Master of the College in 1699, as I have stated; and partly, no doubt, in consequence of the Newtonian sermons which he had preached. In his administration of the College, he zealously stimulated and assisted the exertions of Cotes, Whiston, and other disciples of Newton. Smith, Bentley’s successor as Master of [426] the College, erected a statue of Newton in the College Chapel (a noble work of Roubiliac), with the inscription, Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit.]

At Oxford, David Gregory and Halley, both zealous and distinguished disciples of Newton, obtained the Savilian professorships of astronomy and geometry in 1691 and 1703.

David Gregory’s Astronomiæ Physicæ et Geometricæ Elementa issued from the Oxford Press in 1702. The author, in the first sentence of the Preface, states his object to be to explain the mechanics of the universe (Physica Cœlestis), which Isaac Newton, the Prince of Geometers, has carried to a point of elevation which all look up to with admiration. And this design is executed by a full exposition of the Newtonian doctrines and their results. Keill, a pupil of Gregory, followed his tutor to Oxford, and taught the Newtonian philosophy there in 1700, being then Deputy Sedleian Professor. He illustrated his lectures by experiments, and published an Introduction to the Principia which is not out of use even yet.

In Scotland, the Newtonian philosophy was accepted with great alacrity, as appears by the instances of David Gregory and Keill. David Gregory was professor at Edinburgh before he removed to Oxford, and was succeeded there by his brother James. The latter had, as early as 1690, printed a thesis, containing in twenty-two propositions, a compend of Newton’s Principia.[56] Probably these were intended as theses for academical disputations; as Laughton at Cambridge introduced the Newtonian philosophy into these exercises. The formula at Cambridge, in use till very recently in these disputations, was “Rectè statuit Newtonus de Motu Lunæ;” or the like.

[56] See Hutton’s Math. Dict., art. James Gregory. If it fell in with my plan to notice derivative works, I might speak of Maclaurin’s admirable Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Discoveries, published in 1748. This is still one of the best books on the subject. The late Professor Rigaud’s Historical Essay on the First Publication of Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia” (Oxf. 1838) contains a careful and candid view of the circumstances of that event.

The general diffusion of these opinions in England took place, not only by means of books, but through the labors of various experimental lecturers, like Desaguliers, who removed from Oxford to London in 1713; when he informs us,[57] that “he found the Newtonian philosophy generally received among persons of all ranks and professions, and even among the ladies by the help of experiments.”

[57] Desag. Pref.

[427] We might easily trace in our literature indications of the gradual progress of the Newtonian doctrines. For instance, in the earlier editions of Pope’s Dunciad, this couplet occurred, in the description of the effects of the reign of Dulness:

Philosophy, that reached the heavens before,
Shrinks to her hidden cause, and is no more.

“And this,” says his editor, Warburton, “was intended as a censure on the Newtonian philosophy. For the poet had been misled by the prejudices of foreigners, as if that philosophy had recurred to the occult qualities of Aristotle. This was the idea he received of it from a man educated much abroad, who had read every thing, but every thing superficially.[58] When I hinted to him how he had been imposed upon, he changed the lines with great pleasure into a compliment (as they now stand) on that divine genius, and a satire on that very folly by which he himself had been misled.” In 1743 it was printed,

Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

The Newtonians repelled the charge of dealing in occult causes;[59] and, referring gravity to the will of the Deity, as the First Cause, assumed a superiority over those whose philosophy rested in second causes.

[58] I presume Bolingbroke is here meant.

[59] See Cotes’s Pref. to the Principia.

To the cordial reception of the Newtonian theory by the English astronomers, there is only one conspicuous exception; which is, however, one of some note, being no other than Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, a most laborious and exact observer. Flamsteed at first listened with complacency to the promises of improvements in the Lunar Tables, which the new doctrines held forth, and was willing to assist Newton, and to receive assistance from him. But after a time, he lost his respect for Newton’s theory, and ceased to take any interest in it. He then declared to one of his correspondents,[60] “I have determined to lay these crotchets of Sir Isaac Newton’s wholly aside.” We need not, however, find any difficulty in this, if we recollect that Flamsteed, though a good observer, was no philosopher;—never understood by a Theory any thing more than a Formula which should predict results;—and was incapable of comprehending the object of Newton’s theory, which was to assign causes as well as rules, and to satisfy the conditions of Mechanics as well as of Geometry.

[60] Baily’s Account of Flamsteed, &c., p. 309.

[428] [2d Ed.] [I do not see any reason to retract what was thus said; but it ought perhaps to be distinctly said that on these very accounts Flamsteed’s rejection of Newton’s rules did not imply a denial of the doctrine of gravitation. In the letter above quoted, Flamsteed says that he has been employed upon the Moon, and that “the heavens reject that equation of Sir I. Newton which Gregory and Newton called his sixth: I had then [when he wrote before] compared but 72 of my observations with the tables, now I have examined above 100 more. I find them all firm in the same, and the seventh [equation] too.” And thereupon he comes to the determination above stated.

At an earlier period Flamsteed, as I have said, had received Newton’s suggestions with great deference, and had regulated his own observations and theories with reference to them. The calculation of the lunar inequalities upon the theory of gravitation was found by Newton and his successors to be a more difficult and laborious task than he had anticipated, and was not performed without several trials and errors. One of the equations was at first published (in Gregory’s Astronomiæ Elementa) with a wrong sign. And when Newton had done all, Flamsteed found that the rules were far from coming up to the degree of accuracy which had been claimed for them, that they could give the moon’s place true to 2 or 3 minutes. It was not till considerably later that this amount of exactness was attained.

The late Mr. Baily, to whom astronomy and astronomical literature are so deeply indebted, in his Supplement to the Account of Flamsteed, has examined with great care and great candor the assertion that Flamsteed did not understand Newton’s Theory. He remarks, very justly, that what Newton himself at first presented as his Theory, might more properly be called Rules for computing lunar tables, than a physical Theory in the modern acceptation of the term. He shows, too, that Flamsteed had read the Principia with attention.[61] Nor do I doubt that many considerable mathematicians gave the same imperfect assent to Newton’s doctrine which Flamsteed did. But when we find that others, as Halley, David Gregory, and Cotes, at once not only saw in the doctrine a source of true formulæ, but also a magnificent physical discovery, we are obliged, I think, to make Flamsteed, in this respect, an exception to the first class of astronomers of his own time.

[61] Supp. p. 691.

Mr. Baily’s suggestion that the annual equations for the corrections of the lunar apogee and node were collected from Flamsteed’s tables [429] and observations independently of their suggestion by Newton as the results of Theory (Supp. p. 692, Note, and p. 698), appears to me not to be adequately supported by the evidence given.] ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~

Sect. 3.—Reception of the Newtonian Theory abroad.

The reception of the Newtonian theory on the Continent, was much more tardy and unwilling than in its native island. Even those whose mathematical attainments most fitted them to appreciate its proofs, were prevented by some peculiarity of view from adopting it as a system; as Leibnitz, Bernoulli, Huyghens; who all clung to one modification or other of the system of vortices. In France, the Cartesian system had obtained a wide and popular reception, having been recommended by Fontenelle with the graces of his style; and its empire was so firm and well established in that country, that it resisted for a long time the pressure of Newtonian arguments. Indeed, the Newtonian opinions had scarcely any disciples in France, till Voltaire asserted their claims, on his return from England in 1728: until then, as he himself says, there were not twenty Newtonians out of England.

The hold which the Philosophy of Descartes had upon the minds of his countrymen is, perhaps, not surprising. He really had the merit, a great one in the history of science, of having completely overturned the Aristotelian system, and introduced the philosophy of matter and motion. In all branches of mixed mathematics, as we have already said, his followers were the best guides who had yet appeared. His hypothesis of vortices, as an explanation of the celestial motions, had an apparent advantage over the Newtonian doctrine, in this respect;—that it referred effects to the most intelligible, or at least most familiar kinds of mechanical causation, namely, pressure and impulse. And above all, the system was acceptable to most minds, in consequence of being, as was pretended, deduced from a few simple principles by necessary consequences; and of being also directly connected with metaphysical and theological speculations. We may add, that it was modified by its mathematical adherents in such a way as to remove most of the objections to it. A vortex revolving about a centre could be constructed, or at least it was supposed that it could be constructed, so as to produce a tendency of bodies to the centre. In all cases, therefore, where a central force acted, a vortex was supposed; but in reasoning to the results of this hypothesis, it was [430] easy to leave out of sight all other effects of the vortex, and to consider only the central force; and when this was done, the Cartesian mathematician could apply to his problems a mechanical principle of some degree of consistency. This reflection will, in some degree, account for what at first seems so strange;—the fact that the language of the French mathematicians is Cartesian, for almost half a century after the publication of the Principia of Newton.

There was, however, a controversy between the two opinions going on all this time, and every day showed the insurmountable difficulties under which the Cartesians labored. Newton, in the Principia, had inserted a series of propositions, the object of which was to prove, that the machinery of vortices could not be accommodated to one part of the celestial phenomena, without contradicting another part. A more obvious difficulty was the case of gravity of the earth; if this force arose, as Descartes asserted, from the rotation of the earth’s vortex about its axis, it ought to tend directly to the axis, and not to the centre. The asserters of vortices often tried their skill in remedying this vice in the hypothesis, but never with much success. Huyghens supposed the ethereal matter of the vortices to revolve about the centre in all directions; Perrault made the strata of the vortex increase in velocity of rotation as they recede from the centre; Saurin maintained that the circumambient resistance which comprises the vortex will produce a pressure passing through the centre. The elliptic form of the orbits of the planets was another difficulty. Descartes had supposed the vortices themselves to be oval but others, as John Bernoulli, contrived ways of having elliptical motion in a circular vortex.

The mathematical prize-questions proposed by the French Academy, naturally brought the two sets of opinions into conflict. The Cartesian memoir of John Bernoulli, to which we have just referred, was the one which gained the prize in 1730. It not unfrequently happened that the Academy, as if desirous to show its impartiality, divided the prize between the Cartesians and Newtonians. Thus in 1734, the question being, the cause of the inclination of the orbits of the planets, the prize was shared between John Bernoulli, whose Memoir was founded on the system of vortices, and his son Daniel, who was a Newtonian. The last act of homage of this kind to the Cartesian system was performed in 1740, when the prize on the question of the Tides was distributed between Daniel Bernoulli, Euler, Maclaurin, and Cavallieri; the last of whom had tried to patch up and amend the Cartesian hypothesis on this subject. [431]

Thus the Newtonian system was not adopted in France till the Cartesian generation had died off; Fontenelle, who was secretary to the Academy of Sciences, and who lived till 1756, died a Cartesian. There were exceptions; for instance, Delisle, an astronomer who was selected by Peter the Great of Russia, to found the Academy of St Petersburg; who visited England in 1724, and to whom Newton then gave his picture, and Halley his Tables. But in general, during the interval, that country and this had a national difference of creed on physical subjects. Voltaire, who visited England in 1727, notices this difference in his lively manner. “A Frenchman who arrives in London, finds a great alteration in philosophy, as in other things. He left the world full plenum], he finds it empty. At Paris you see the universe composed of vortices of subtle matter, in London we see nothing of the kind. With you it is the pressure of the moon which causes the tides of the sea, in England it is the sea which gravitates towards the moon; so that when you think the moon ought to give us high water, these gentlemen believe that you ought to have low water; which unfortunately we cannot test by experience; for in order to do that, we should have examined the Moon and the Tides at the moment of the creation. You will observe also that the sun, which in France has nothing to do with the business, here comes in for a quarter of it. Among you Cartesians, all is done by an impulsion which one does not well understand; with the Newtonians, it is done by an attraction of which we know the cause no better. At Paris you fancy the earth shaped like a melon, at London it is flattened on the two sides.”

It was Voltaire himself as we have said, who was mainly instrumental in giving the Newtonian doctrines currency in France. He was at first refused permission to print his Elements of the Newtonian Philosophy, by the Chancellor, D’Aguesseaux, who was a Cartesian; but after the appearance of this work in 1738, and of other writings by him on the same subject, the Cartesian edifice, already without real support or consistency, crumbled to pieces and disappeared. The first Memoir in the Transactions of the French Academy in which the doctrine of central force is applied to the solar system, is one by the Chevalier de Louville in 1720, On the Construction and Theory of Tables of the Sun. In this, however, the mode of explaining the motions of the planets by means of an original impulse and an attractive force is attributed to Kepler, not to Newton. The first Memoir which refers to the universal gravitation of matter is by Maupertuis, in [432] 1736. But Newton was not unknown or despised in France till this time. In 1699 he was admitted one of the very small number of foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. Even Fontenelle, who, as we have said, never adopted his opinions, spoke of him in a worthy manner, in the Eloge which he composed on the occasion of his death. At a much earlier period too, Fontenelle did homage to his fame. The following passage refers, I presume, to Newton. In the History of the Academy for 1708, which is written by the secretary, he says,[62] in referring to the difficulty which the comets occasion in the Cartesian hypothesis: “We might relieve ourselves at once from all the embarrassment which arises from the directions of these motions, by suppressing, as has been done by one of the greatest geniuses of the age, all this immense fluid matter, which we commonly suppose between the planets, and conceiving them suspended in a perfect void.”

[62] Hist. Ac. Sc. 1708. p. 103.

Comets, as the above passage implies, were a kind of artillery which the Cartesian plenum could not resist. When it appeared that the paths of such wanderers traversed the vortices in all directions, it was impossible to maintain that these imaginary currents governed the movements of bodies immersed in them and the mechanism ceased to have any real efficacy. Both these phenomena of comets, and many others, became objects of a stronger and more general interest, in consequence of the controversy between the rival parties; and thus the prevalence of the Cartesian system did not seriously impede the progress of sound knowledge. In some cases, no doubt, it made men unwilling to receive the truth, as in the instance of the deviation of the comets from the zodiacal motion; and again, when Römer discovered that light was not instantaneously propagated. But it encouraged observation and calculation, and thus forwarded the verification and extension of the Newtonian system; of which process we must now consider some of the incidents. [433]

CHAPTER IV.
Sequel to the Epoch of Newton, continued.—Verification and Completion of the Newtonian Theory.

---

Sect. 1.—Division of the Subject.

THE verification of the Law of Universal Gravitation as the governing principle of all cosmical phenomena, led, as we have already stated, to a number of different lines of research, all long and difficult. Of these we may treat successively, the motions of the Moon, of the Sun, of the Planets, of the Satellites, of Comets; we may also consider separately the Secular Inequalities, which at first sight appear to follow a different law from the other changes; we may then speak of the results of the principle as they affect this Earth, in its Figure, in the amount of Gravity at different places, and in the phenomena of the Tides. Each of these subjects has lent its aid to confirm the general law: but in each the confirmation has had its peculiar difficulties, and has its separate history. Our sketch of this history must be very rapid, for our aim is only to show what is the kind and course of the confirmation which such a theory demands and receives.

For the same reason we pass over many events of this period which are highly important in the history of astronomy. They have lost much of their interest for us, and even for common readers, because they are of a class with which we are already familiar, truths included in more general truths to which our eyes now most readily turn. Thus, the discovery of new satellites and planets is but a repetition of what was done by Galileo: the determination of their nodes and apses, the reduction of their motions to the law of the ellipse, is but a fresh exemplification of the discoveries of Kepler. Otherwise, the formation of Tables of the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, the discovery of the eccentricities of the orbits, and of the motions of the nodes and apses, by Cassini, Halley, and others, would rank with the great achievements in astronomy. Newton’s peculiar advance in the Tables of the celestial motions is the introduction of Perturbations. To these motions, so affected, we now proceed. [434]

Sect. 2.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to the Moon.

The Motions of the Moon may be first spoken of, as the most obvious and the most important of the applications of the Newtonian Theory. The verification of such a theory consists, as we have seen in previous cases, in the construction of Tables derived from the theory, and the comparison of these with observation. The advancement of astronomy would alone have been a sufficient motive for this labor; but there were other reasons which urged it on with a stronger impulse. A perfect Lunar Theory, if the theory could be perfected, promised to supply a method of finding the Longitude of any place on the earth’s surface; and thus the verification of a theory which professed to be complete in its foundations, was identified with an object of immediate practical use to navigators and geographers, and of vast acknowledged value. A good method for the near discovery of the longitude had been estimated by nations and princes at large sums of money. The Dutch were willing to tempt Galileo to this task by the offer of a chain of gold: Philip the Third of Spain had promised a reward for this object still earlier;[63] the parliament of England, in 1714, proposed a recompense of 20,000l. sterling; the Regent Duke of Orléans, two years afterwards, offered 100,000 francs for the same purpose. These prizes, added to the love of truth and of fame, kept this object constantly before the eyes of mathematicians, during the first half of the last century.

[63] Del. A. M. i. 39, 66.

If the Tables could be so constructed as to represent the moon’s real place in the heavens with extreme precision, as it would be seen from a standard observatory, the observation of her apparent place, as seen from any other point of the earth’s surface, would enable the observer to find his longitude from the standard point. The motions of the moon had hitherto so ill agreed with the best Tables, that this method failed altogether. Newton had discovered the ground of this want of agreement. He had shown that the same force which produces the Evection, Variation, and Annual Equation, must produce also a long series of other Inequalities, of various magnitudes and cycles, which perpetually drag the moon before or behind the place where she would be sought by an astronomer who knew only of those principal and notorious inequalities. But to calculate and apply the new inequalities, was no slight undertaking. [435]

In the first edition of the Principia in 1687, Newton had not given any calculations of new inequalities affecting the longitude of the moon. But in David Gregory’s Elements of Physical and Geometrical Astronomy, published in 1702, is inserted[64] “Newton’s Lunar Theory as applied by him to Practice;” in which the great discoverer has given the results of his calculations of eight of the lunar Equations, their quantities, epochs, and periods. These calculations were for a long period the basis of new Tables of the Moon, which were published by various persons;[65] as by Delisle in 1715 or 1716, Grammatici at Ingoldstadt in 1726, Wright in 1732, Angelo Capelli at Venice in 1733, Dunthorne at Cambridge in 1739.

[64] P. 332.

[65] Lalande, 1457.

Flamsteed had given Tables of the Moon upon Horrox’s theory in 1681, and wished to improve them; and though, as we have seen, he would not, or could not, accept Newton’s doctrines in their whole extent, Newton communicated his theory to the observer in the shape in which he could understand it and use it:[66] and Flamsteed employed these directions in constructing new Lunar Tables, which he called his Theory.[67] These Tables were not published till long after his death, by Le Monnier at Paris in 1746. They are said, by Lalande,[68] not to differ much from Halley’s. Halley’s Tables of the Moon were printed in 1719 or 1720, but not published till after his death in 1749. They had been founded on Flamsteed’s observations and his own; and when, in 1720, Halley succeeded Flamsteed in the post of Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, and conceived that he had the means of much improving what he had done before, he began by printing what he had already executed.[69]

[66] Baily. Account of Flamsteed, p. 72.

[67] P. 211.

[68] Lal. 1459.

[69] Mr. Baily* says that Mayer’s Nouvelles Tables de la Lune in 1753, published upwards of fifty years after Gregory’s Astronomy, may be considered as the first lunar tables formed solely on Newton’s principles. Though Wright in 1732 published New and Correct Tables of the Lunar Motions according to the Newtonian Theory, Newton’s rules were in them only partially adopted. In 1735 Leadbetter published his Uranoscopia, in which those rules were more fully followed. But these Newtonian Tables did not supersede Flamsteed’s Horroxian Tables, till both were supplanted by those of Mayer.

*Supp. p. 702.

But Halley had long proposed a method, different from that of Newton, but marked by great ingenuity, for amending the Lunar Tables. He proposed to do this by the use of a cycle, which we have mentioned as one of the earliest discoveries in astronomy;—the Period of 223 lunations, or eighteen years and eleven days, the Chaldean [436] Saros. This period was anciently used for predicting the eclipses of the sun and moon; for those eclipses which happen during this period, are repeated again in the same order, and with nearly the same circumstances, after the expiration of one such period and the commencement of a second. The reason of this is, that at the end of such a cycle, the moon is in nearly the same position with respect to the sun, her nodes, and her apogee, as she was at first; and is only a few degrees distant from the same part of the heavens. But on the strength of this consideration, Halley conjectured that all the irregularities of the moon’s motion, however complex they may be, would recur after such an interval; and that, therefore, if the requisite corrections were determined by observation for one such period, we might by means of them give accuracy to the Tables for all succeeding periods. This idea occurred to him before he was acquainted with Newton’s views.[70] After the lunar theory of the Principia had appeared, he could not help seeing that the idea was confirmed; for the inequalities of the moon’s motion, which arise from the attraction of the sun, will depend on her positions with regard to the sun, the apogee, and the node; and therefore, however numerous, will recur when these positions recur.

[70] Phil. Trans. 1731, p. 188.

Halley announced, in 1691,[71] his intention of following this idea into practice; in a paper in which he corrected the text of three passages in Pliny, in which this period is mentioned, and from which it is sometimes called the Plinian period. In 1710, in the preface to a new edition to Street’s Caroline Tables, he stated that he had already confirmed it to a considerable extent.[72] And even after Newton’s theory had been applied, he still resolved to use his cycle as a means of obtaining further accuracy. On succeeding to the Observatory at Greenwich in 1720, he was further delayed by finding that the instruments had belonged to Flamsteed, and were removed by his executors. “And this,” he says,[73] “was the more grievous to me, on account of my advanced age, being then in my sixty-fourth year: which put me past all hopes of ever living to see a complete period of eighteen years’ observation. But, thanks to God, he has been pleased hitherto (in 1731) to afford me sufficient health and strength to execute my office, in all its parts, with my own hands and eyes, without any assistance or interruption, during one whole period of the moon’s [437] apogee, which period is performed in somewhat less than nine years.” He found the agreement very remarkable, and conceived hopes of attaining the great object, of finding the Longitude with the requisite degree of exactness; nor did he give up his labors on this subject till he had completed his Plinian period in 1739.

[71] Ib. p. 536.

[72] Ib. 1731, p. 187.

[73] Ib. p. 193.

The accuracy with which Halley conceived himself able to predict the moon’s place[74] was within two minutes of space, or one fifteenth of the breadth of the moon herself. The accuracy required for obtaining the national reward was considerably greater. Le Monnier pursued the idea of Halley.[75] But before Halley’s method had been completed, it was superseded by the more direct prosecution of Newton’s views.

[74] Phil. Trans. 1731, p. 195.

[75] Bailly, A. M. c. 131.

We have already remarked, in the history of analytical mechanics, that in the Lunar Theory, considered as one of the cases of the Problem of Three Bodies, no advance was made beyond what Newton had done, till mathematicians threw aside the Newtonian artifices, and applied the newly developed generalizations of the analytical method. The first great apparent deficiency in the agreement of the law of universal gravitation with astronomical observation, was removed by Clairaut’s improved approximation to the theoretical Motion of the Moon’s Apogee, in 1750; yet not till it had caused so much disquietude, that Clairaut himself had suggested a modification of the law of attraction; and it was only in tracing the consequences of this suggestion, that he found the Newtonian law of the inverse square to be that which, when rightly developed, agreed with the facts. Euler solved the problem by the aid of his analysis in 1745,[76] and published Tables of the Moon in 1746. His tables were not very accurate at first;[77] but he, D’Alembert, and Clairaut, continued to labor at this object, and the two latter published Tables of the Moon in 1754.[78] Finally, Tobias Mayer, an astronomer of Göttingen, having compared Euler’s tables with observations, corrected them so successfully, that in 1753 he published Tables of the Moon, which really did possess the accuracy which Halley only flattered himself that he had attained. Mayer’s success in his first Tables encouraged him to make them still more perfect. He applied himself to the mechanical theory of the moon’s orbit; corrected all the coefficients of the series by a great number of observations; and in 1755, sent his new Tables to London as worthy to claim the prize offered for the discovery of longitude. He died soon after [438] (in 1762), at the early age of thirty-nine, worn out by his incessant labors; and his widow sent to London a copy of his Tables with additional corrections. These Tables were committed to Bradley, then Astronomer Royal, in order to be compared with observation. Bradley labored at this task with unremitting zeal and industry, having himself long entertained hopes that the Lunar Method of finding the Longitude might be brought into general use. He and his assistant, Gael Morris, introduced corrections into Mayer’s Tables of 1755. In his report of 1756, he says,[79] that he did not find any difference so great as a minute and a quarter; and in 1760, he adds, that this deviation had been further diminished by his corrections. It is not foreign to our purpose to observe the great labor which this verification required. Not less than 1220 observations, and long calculations founded upon each, were employed. The accuracy which Mayer’s Tables possessed was considered to entitle them to a part of the parliamentary reward; they were printed in 1770, and his widow received 3000l. from the English nation. At the same time, Euler, whose Tables had been the origin and foundation of Mayer’s, also had a recompense of the same amount.

[76] Lal. 1460.

[77] Bradley’s Correspondence.

[78] Lal. 1460.

[79] Bradley’s Mem. p. xcviii.

This public national acknowledgment of the practical accuracy of these Tables is, it will be observed, also a solemn recognition of the truth of the Newtonian theory, as far as truth can be judged of by men acting under the highest official responsibility, and aided by the most complete command of the resources of the skill and talents of others. The finding the Longitude is thus the seal of the moon’s gravitation to the sun and earth; and with this occurrence, therefore, our main concern with the history of the Lunar Theory ends. Various improvements have been since introduced into this research; but on these we, with so many other subjects before us, must forbear to enter.

Sect. 3.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to the Planets, Satellites, and Earth.

The theories of the Planets and Satellites, as affected by the law of universal gravitation, and therefore by perturbations, were naturally subjects of interest, after the promulgation of that law. Some of the effects of the mutual attraction of the planets had, indeed, already attracted notice. The inequality produced by the mutual attraction of Jupiter and Saturn cannot be overlooked by a good observer. In the [439] preface to the second edition of the Principia, Cotes remarks,[80] that the perturbation of Jupiter and Saturn is not unknown to astronomers. In Halley’s Tables it was noticed[81] that there are very great deviations from regularity in these two planets, and these deviations are ascribed to the perturbing force of the planets on each other; but the correction of these by a suitable equation is left to succeeding astronomers.

[80] Preface to Principia, p. xxi.

[81] End of Planetary Tables.

The motion of the planes and apsides of the planetary orbits was one of the first results of their mutual perturbation which was observed. In 1706, La Hire and Maraldi compared Jupiter with the Rudolphine Tables, and those of Bullialdus: it appeared that his aphelion had advanced, and that his nodes had regressed. In 1728, J. Cassini found that Saturn’s aphelion had in like manner travelled forwards. In 1720, when Louville refused to allow in his solar tables the motion of the aphelion of the earth, Fontenelle observed that this was a misplaced scrupulousness, since the aphelion of Mercury certainly advances. Yet this reluctance to admit change and irregularity was not yet overcome. When astronomers had found an approximate and apparent constancy and regularity, they were willing to believe it absolute and exact. In the satellites of Jupiter, for instance, they were unwilling to admit even the eccentricity of the orbits; and still more, the variation of the nodes, inclinations, and apsides. But all the fixedness of these was successively disproved. Fontenelle in 1732, on the occasion of Maraldi’s discovery of the change of inclination of the fourth satellite, expresses a suspicion that all the elements might prove liable to change. “We see,” says he, “the constancy of the inclination already shaken in the three first satellites, and the eccentricity in the fourth. The immobility of the nodes holds out so far, but there are strong indications that it will share the same fate.”

The motions of the nodes and apsides of the satellites are a necessary part of the Newtonian theory; and even the Cartesian astronomers now required only data, in order to introduce these changes into their Tables.

The complete reformation of the Tables of the Sun, Planets, and Satellites, which followed as a natural consequence from the revolution which Newton had introduced, was rendered possible by the labors of the great constellation of mathematicians of whom we have spoken in the last book, Clairaut, Euler, D’Alembert, and their successors; and [440] it was carried into effect in the course of the last century. Thus Lalande applied Clairaut’s theory to Mars, as did Mayer; and the inequalities in this case, says Bailly[82] in 1785, may amount to two minutes, and therefore must not be neglected. Lalande determined the inequalities of Venus, as did Father Walmesley, an English mathematician; these were found to reach only to thirty seconds.

[82] Ast. Mod. iii. 170.

The Planetary Tables[83] which were in highest repute, up to the end of the last century, were those of Lalande. In these, the perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn were introduced, their magnitude being such that they cannot be dispensed with; but the Tables of Mercury, Venus, and Mars, had no perturbations. Hence these latter Tables might be considered as accurate enough to enable the observer to find the object, but not to test the theory of perturbations. But when the calculation of the mutual disturbances of the planets was applied, it was always found that it enabled mathematicians to bring the theoretical places to coincide more exactly with those observed. In improving, as much as possible, this coincidence, it is necessary to determine the mass of each planet; for upon that, according to the law of universal gravitation, its disturbing power depends. Thus, in 1813, Lindenau published Tables of Mercury, and concluded, from them, that a considerable increase of the supposed mass of Venus was necessary to reconcile theory with observation.[84] He had published Tables of Venus in 1810, and of Mars in 1811. And, in proving Bouvard’s Tables of Jupiter and Saturn, values were obtained of the masses of those planets. The form in which the question of the truth of the doctrine of universal gravitation now offers itself to the minds of astronomers, is this:—that it is taken for granted that it will account for the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the question is, with what supposed masses it will give the best account.[85] The continually increasing accuracy of the table shows the truth of the fundamental assumption.

[83] Airy, Report on Ast. to Brit. Ass. 1832.

[84] Airy, Report on Ast. to Brit. Ass. 1832.

[85] Among the most important corrections of the supposed masses of the planets, we may notice that of Jupiter, by Professor Airy. This determination of Jupiter’s mass was founded, not on the effect as seen in perturbations, but on a much more direct datum, the time of revolution of his fourth satellite. It appeared, from this calculation, that Jupiter’s mass required to be increased by about ¹⁄₈₀th. This result agrees with that which has been derived by German astronomers from the perturbations which the attractions of Jupiter produce in the four new planets, and has been generally adopted as an improvement of the elements of our system.

The question of perturbation is exemplified in the satellites also. [441] Thus the satellites of Jupiter are not only disturbed by the sun, as the moon is, but also by each other, as the planets are. This mutual action gives rise to some very curious relations among their motions; which, like most of the other leading inequalities, were forced upon the notice of astronomers by observation before they were obtained by mathematical calculation. In Bradley’s remarks upon his own Tables of Jupiter’s Satellites, published among Halley’s Tables, he observes that the places of the three interior satellites are affected by errors which recur in a cycle of 437 days, answering to the time in which they return to the same relative position with regard to each other, and to the axis of Jupiter’s shadow. Wargentin, who had noticed the same circumstance without knowledge of what Bradley had done, applied it, with all diligence, to the purpose of improving the tables of the satellites in 1746. But, at a later period, Laplace established, by mathematical reasoning, the very curious theorem on which this cycle depends, which he calls the libration of Jupiter’s satellites; and Delambre was then able to publish Tables of Jupiter’s Satellites more accurate than those of Wargentin, which he did in 1789.[86]

[86] Voiron, Hist. Ast. p. 322.

The progress of physical astronomy from the time of Euler and Clairaut, has consisted of a series of calculations and comparisons of the most abstruse and recondite kind. The formation of Tables of the Planets and Satellites from the theory, required the solution of problems much more complex than the original case of the Problem of Three Bodies. The real motions of the planets and their orbits are rendered still further intricate by this, that all the lines and points to which we can refer them, are themselves in motion. The task of carrying order and law into this mass of apparent confusion, has required a long series of men of transcendent intellectual powers; and a perseverance and delicacy of observation, such as we have not the smallest example of in any other subject. It is impossible here to give any detailed account of these labors; but we may mention one instance of the complex considerations which enter into them. The nodes of Jupiter’s fourth satellite do not go backwards,[87] as the Newtonian theory seems to require; they advance upon Jupiter’s orbit. But then, it is to be recollected that the theory requires the nodes to retrograde upon the orbit of the perturbing body, which is here the third satellite; and Lalande showed that, by the necessary relations of space, the latter motion may be retrograde though the former is direct.

[87] Bailly, iii. 175.

[442] Attempts have been made, from the time of the solution of the Problem of three bodies to the present, to give the greatest possible accuracy to the Tables of the Sun, by considering the effect of the various perturbations to which the earth is subject. Thus, in 1756, Euler calculated the effect of the attractions of the planets on the earth (the prize-question of the French Academy of Sciences), and Clairaut soon after. Lacaille, making use of these results, and of his own numerous observations, published Tables of the Sun. In 1786, Delambre[88] undertook to verify and improve these tables, by comparing them with 314 observations made by Maskelyne, at Greenwich, in 1775 and 1784, and in some of the intermediate years. He corrected most of the elements; but he could not remove the uncertainty which occurred respecting the amount of the inequality produced by the reaction of the moon. He admitted also, in pursuance of Clairaut’s theory, a second term of this inequality depending on the moon’s latitude; but irresolutely, and half disposed to reject it on the authority of the observations. Succeeding researches of mathematicians have shown, that this term is not admissible as a result of mechanical principles. Delambre’s Tables, thus improved, were exact to seven or eight seconds;[89] which was thought, and truly, a very close coincidence for the time. But astronomers were far from resting content with this. In 1806, the French Board of Longitude published Delambre’s improved Solar Tables; and in the Connaissance des Tems for 1816, Burckhardt gave the results of a comparison of Delambre’s Tables with a great number of Maskelyne’s observations;—far greater than the number on which they were founded.[90] It appeared that the epoch, the perigee, and the eccentricity, required sensible alterations, and that the mass of Venus ought to be reduced about one-ninth, and that of the Moon to be sensibly diminished. In 1827, Professor Airy[91] compared Delambre’s tables with 2000 Greenwich observations, made with the new transit-instrument at Cambridge, and deduced from this comparison the correction of the elements. These in general agreed closely with Burckhardt’s, excepting that a diminution of Mars appeared necessary. Some discordances, however, led Professor Airy to suspect the existence of an inequality which had escaped the sagacity of Laplace and Burckhardt. And, a few weeks after this suspicion had been expressed, the same mathematician announced to the Royal Society that he had [443] detected, in the planetary theory such an inequality, hitherto unnoticed, arising from the mutual attraction of Venus and the Earth. Its whole effect on the earth’s longitude, would be to increase or diminish it by nearly three seconds of space, and its period is about 240 years. “This term,” he adds, “accounts completely for the difference of the secular motions given by the comparison of the epochs of 1783 and 1821, and by that of the epochs of 1801 and 1821.”

[88] Voiron, Hist. p. 315.

[89] Montucla, iv. 42.

[90] Airy, Report, p. 150.

[91] Phil. Trans. 1828.

Many excellent Tables of the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, were published in the latter part of the last century; but the Bureau des Longitudes which was established in France in 1795, endeavored to give new or improved tables of most of these motions. Thus were produced Delambre’s Tables of the Sun, Burg’s Tables of the Moon, Bouvard’s Tables of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. The agreement between these and observation is, in general, truly marvellous.

We may notice here a difference in the mode of referring to observation when a theory is first established, and when it is afterwards to be confirmed and corrected. It was remarked as a merit in the method of Hipparchus, and an evidence of the mathematical coherence of his theory, that in order to determine the place of the sun’s apogee, and the eccentricity of his orbit, he required to know nothing besides the lengths of winter and spring. But if the fewness of the requisite data is a beauty in the first fixation of a theory, the multitude of observations to which it applies is its excellence when it is established; and in correcting Tables, mathematicians take far more data than would be requisite to determine the elements. For the theory ought to account for all the facts: and since it will not do this with mathematical rigor (for observation is not perfect), the elements are determined, not so as to satisfy any selected observations, but so as to make the whole mass of error as small as possible. And thus, in the adaptation of theory to observation, even in its most advanced state, there is room for sagacity and skill, prudence and judgment.

In this manner, by selecting the best mean elements of the motions of the heavenly bodies, the observed motions deviate from this mean in the way the theory points out, and constantly return to it. To this general rule, of the constant return to a mean, there are, however, some apparent exceptions, of which we shall now speak. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~ [444]

Sect. 4.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to Secular Inequalities.

Secular Inequalities in the motions of the heavenly bodies occur in consequence of changes in the elements of the solar system, which go on progressively from age to age. The example of such changes which was first studied by astronomers, was the Acceleration of the Moon’s Mean Motion, discovered by Halley. The observed fact was, that the moon now moves in a very small degree quicker than she did in the earlier ages of the world. When this was ascertained, the various hypotheses which appeared likely to account for the fact were reduced to calculation. The resistance of the medium in which the heavenly bodies move was the most obvious of these hypotheses. Another, which was for some time dwelt upon by Laplace, was the successive transmission of gravity, that is, the hypothesis that the gravity of the earth takes a certain finite time to reach the moon. But none of these suppositions gave satisfactory conclusions; and the strength of Euler, D’Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace, was for a time foiled by this difficulty. At length, in 1787, Laplace announced to the Academy that he had discovered the true cause of this acceleration, and that it arose from the action of the sun upon the moon, combined with the secular variation of the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. It was found that the effects of this combination would exactly account for the changes which had hitherto so perplexed mathematicians. A very remarkable result of this investigation was, that “this Secular Inequality of the motion of the moon is periodical, but it requires millions of years to re-establish itself;” so that after an almost inconceivable time, the acceleration will become a retardation. Laplace some time after (in 1797), announced other discoveries, relative to the secular motions of the apogee and the nodes of the moon’s orbit. Laplace collected these researches in his “Theory of the Moon,” which he published in the third volume of the Mécanique Céleste in 1802.

A similar case occurred with regard to an acceleration of Jupiter’s mean motion, and a retardation of Saturn’s, which had been observed by Cassini, Maraldi, and Horrox. After several imperfect attempts by other mathematicians, Laplace, in 1787, found that there resulted from the mutual attraction of these two planets a great Inequality, of which the period is 929 years and a half, and which has accelerated Jupiter and retarded Saturn ever since the restoration of astronomy. [445]

Thus the secular inequalities of the celestial motions, like all the others, confirm the law of universal gravitation. They are called “secular,” because ages are requisite to unfold their existence, and because they are not obviously periodical. They might, in some measure, be considered as extensions of the Newtonian theory, for though Newton’s law accounts for such facts, he did not, so far as we know, foresee such a result of it. But on the other hand, they are exactly of the same nature as those which he did foresee and calculate. And when we call them secular in opposition to periodical, it is not that there is any real difference, for they, too, have their cycle; but it is that we have assumed our mean motion without allowing for these long inequalities. And thus, as Laplace observes on this very occasion,[92] the lot of this great discovery of gravitation is no less than this, that every apparent exception becomes a proof, every difficulty a new occasion of a triumph. And such, as he truly adds, is the character of a true theory,—of a real representation of nature.

[92] Syst. du Monde, 8vo, ii. 37.

It is impossible for us here to enumerate even the principal objects which have thus filled the triumphal march of the Newtonian theory from its outset up to the present time. But among these secular changes, we may mention the Diminution of the Obliquity of the Ecliptic, which has been going on from the earliest times to the present. This change has been explained by theory, and shown to have, like all the other changes of the system, a limit, after which the diminution will be converted into an increase.

We may mention here some subjects of a kind somewhat different from those just spoken of. The true theoretical quantity of the Precession of the Equinoxes, which had been erroneously calculated by Newton, was shown by D’Alembert to agree with observation. The constant coincidence of the Nodes of the Moon’s Equator with those of her Orbit, was proved to result from mechanical principles by Lagrange. The curious circumstance that the Time of the Moon’s rotation on her axis is equal to the Time of her revolution about the earth, was shown to be consistent with the results of the laws of motion by Laplace. Laplace also, as we have seen, explained certain remarkable relations which constantly connect the longitudes of the three first satellites of Jupiter; Bailly and Lagrange analyzed and explained the curious librations of the nodes and inclinations of their orbits; and Laplace traced the effect of Jupiter’s oblate figure on their motions, [446] which masks the other causes of inequality, by determining the direction of the motions of the perijove and node of each satellite.

Sect. 5.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to the New Planets.

We are now so accustomed to consider the Newtonian theory as true, that we can hardly imagine to ourselves the possibility that those planets which were not discovered when the theory was founded, should contradict its doctrines. We can scarcely conceive it possible that Uranus or Ceres should have been found to violate Kepler’s laws, or to move without suffering perturbations from Jupiter and Saturn. Yet if we can suppose men to have had any doubt of the exact and universal truth of the doctrine of universal gravitation, at the period of these discoveries, they must have scrutinized the motions of these new bodies with an interest far more lively than that with which we now look for the predicted return of a comet. The solid establishment of the Newtonian theory is thus shown by the manner in which we take it for granted not only in our reasonings, but in our feelings. But though this is so, a short notice of the process by which the new planets were brought within the domain of the theory may properly find a place here.

William Herschel, a man of great energy and ingenuity, who had made material improvements in reflecting telescopes, observing at Bath on the 13th of March, 1781, discovered, in the constellation Gemini, a star larger and less luminous than the fixed stars. On the application of a more powerful telescope, it was seen magnified, and two days afterwards he perceived that it had changed its place. The attention of the astronomical world was directed to this new object, and the best astronomers in every part of Europe employed themselves in following it along the sky.[93]

[93] Voiron, Hist. Ast. p. 12.

The admission of an eighth planet into the long-established list, was a notion so foreign to men’s thoughts at that time, that other suppositions were first tried. The orbit of the new body was at first calculated as if it had been a comet running in a parabolic path. But in a few days the star deviated from the course thus assigned it: and it was in vain that in order to represent the observations, the perihelion distance of the parabola was increased from fourteen to eighteen times the earth’s distance from the sun. Saron, of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, is said[94] to have been the first person who perceived that the [447] places were better represented by a circle than by a parabola: and Lexell, a celebrated mathematician of Petersburg, found that a motion in a circular orbit, with a radius double of that of Saturn, would satisfy all the observations. This made its period about eighty-two years.

[94] Ibid.

Lalande soon discovered that the circular motion was subject to a sensible inequality: the orbit was, in fact, an ellipse, like those of the other planets. To determine the equation of the centre of a body which revolves so slowly, would, according to the ancient methods, have required many years; but Laplace contrived methods by which the elliptical elements were determined from four observations, within little more than a year from its first discovery by Herschel. These calculations were soon followed by tables of the new planet, published by Nouet.

In order to obtain additional accuracy, it now became necessary to take account of the perturbations. The French Academy of Sciences proposed, in 1789, the construction of new Tables of this Planet as its prize-question. It is a curious illustration of the constantly accumulating evidence of the theory, that the calculation of the perturbations of the planet enabled astronomers to discover that it had been observed as a star in three different positions in former times; namely, by Flamsteed in 1690, by Mayer in 1756, and by Le Monnier in 1769. Delambre, aided by this discovery and by the theory of Laplace, calculated Tables of the planet, which, being compared with observation for three years, never deviated from it more than seven seconds. The Academy awarded its prize to these Tables, they were adopted by the astronomers of Europe, and the planet of Herschel now conforms to the laws of attraction, along with those ancient members of the known system from which the theory was inferred.

The history of the discovery of the other new planets, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, is nearly similar to that just related, except that their planetary character was more readily believed. The first of these was discovered on the first day of this century by Piazzi, the astronomer at Palermo; but he had only begun to suspect its nature, and had not completed his third observation, when his labors were suspended by a dangerous illness; and on his recovery the star was invisible, being lost in the rays of the sun.

He declared it to be a planet with an elliptical orbit; but the path which it followed, on emerging from the neighborhood of the sun, was not that which Piazzi had traced out for it. Its extreme smallness made it difficult to rediscover; and the whole of the year 1801 was [448] employed in searching the sky for it in vain. At last, after many trials, Von Zach and Olbers again found it, the one on the last day of 1801, the other on the first day of 1802. Gauss and Burckhardt immediately used the new observations in determining the elements of the orbit; and the former invented a new method for the purpose. Ceres now moves in a path of which the course and inequalities are known, and can no more escape the scrutiny of astronomers.

The second year of the nineteenth century also produced its planet. This was discovered by Dr. Olbers, a physician of Bremen, while he was searching for Ceres among the stars of the constellation Virgo. He found a star which had a perceptible motion even in the space of two hours. It was soon announced as a new planet, and received from its discoverer the name of Pallas. As in the case of Ceres, Burckhardt and Gauss employed themselves in calculating its orbit. But some peculiar difficulties here occurred. Its eccentricity is greater than that of any of the old planets, and the inclination of its orbit to the ecliptic is not less than thirty-five degrees. These circumstances both made its perturbations large, and rendered them difficult to calculate. Burckhardt employed the known processes of analysis, but they were found insufficient: and the Imperial Institute (as the French Academy was termed during the reign of Napoleon) proposed the Perturbations of Pallas as a prize-question.

To these discoveries succeeded others of the same kind. The German astronomers agreed to examine the whole of the zone in which Ceres and Pallas move; in the hope of finding other planets, fragments, as Olbers conceived they might possibly be, of one original mass. In the course of this research, Mr. Harding of Lilienthal, on the first of September, 1804, found a new star, which he soon was led to consider as a planet. Gauss and Burckhardt also calculated the elements of this orbit, and the planet was named Juno.

After this discovery, Olbers sought the sky for additional fragments of his planet with extraordinary perseverance. He conceived that one of two opposite constellations, the Virgin or the Whale, was the place where its separation must have taken place; and where, therefore, all the orbits of all the portions must pass. He resolved to survey, three times a year, all the small stars in these two regions. This undertaking, so curious in its nature, was successful. The 29th of March, 1807, he discovered Vesta, which was soon found to be a planet. And to show the manner in which Olbers pursued his labors, we may state that he afterwards published a notification that he had examined the [449] same parts of the heavens with such regularity, that he was certain no new planet had passed that way between 1808 and 1816. Gauss and Burckhardt computed the orbit of Vesta; and when Gauss compared one of his orbits with twenty-two observations of M. Bouvard, he found the errors below seventeen seconds of space in right ascension, and still less in declination.

The elements of all these orbits have been successively improved, and this has been done entirely by the German mathematicians.[95] These perturbations are calculated, and the places for some time before and after opposition are now given in the Berlin Ephemeris. “I have lately observed,” says Professor Airy, “and compared with the Berlin Ephemeris, the right ascensions of Juno and Vesta, and I find that they are rather more accurate than those of Venus:” so complete is the confirmation of the theory by these new bodies; so exact are the methods of tracing the theory to its consequences.

[95] Airy, Rep. 157.

We may observe that all these new-discovered bodies have received names taken from the ancient mythology. In the case of the first of these, astronomers were originally divided; the discoverer himself named it the Georgium Sidus, in honor of his patron, George the Third; Lalande and others called it Herschel. Nothing can be more just than this mode of perpetuating the fame of the author of a discovery; but it was felt to be ungraceful to violate the homogeneity of the ancient system of names. Astronomers tried to find for the hitherto neglected denizen of the skies, an appropriate place among the deities to whose assembly he was at last admitted; and Uranus, the father of Saturn, was fixed upon as best suiting the order of the course.

The mythological nomenclature of planets appeared, from this time, to be generally agreed to. Piazzi termed his Ceres Ferdinandea. The first term, which contains a happy allusion to Sicily, the country of the discovery in modern, and of the goddess in ancient, times, has been accepted; the attempt to pay a compliment to royalty out of the products of science, in this as in most other cases, has been set aside. Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, were named, without any peculiar propriety of selection, according to the choice of their discoverers. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~

Sect. 6.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to Comets.

A few words must be said upon another class of bodies, which at first seemed as lawless as the clouds and winds; and which astronomy [450] has reduced to a regularity as complete as that of the sun;—upon Comets. No part of the Newtonian discoveries excited a more intense interest than this. These anomalous visitants were anciently gazed at with wonder and alarm; and might still, as in former times, be accused of “perplexing nations,” though with very different fears and questionings. The conjecture that they, too, obeyed the law of universal gravitation, was to be verified by showing that they described a curve such as that force would produce. Hevelius, who was a most diligent observer of these objects, had, without reference to gravitation, satisfied himself that they moved in parabolas.[96] To determine the elements of the parabola from observations, even Newton called[97] “problema longe difficillimum.” Newton determined the orbit of the comet of 1680 by certain graphical methods. His methods supposed the orbit to be a parabola, and satisfactorily represented the motion in the visible part of the comet’s path. But this method did not apply to the possible return of the wandering star. Halley has the glory of having first detected a periodical comet, in the case of that which has since borne his name. But this great discovery was not made without labor. In 1705, Halley[98] explained how the parabolic orbit of a planet may be determined from three observations; and, joining example to precept, himself calculated the positions and orbits of twenty-four comets. He found, as the reward of this industry, that the comets of 1607 and of 1531 had the same orbit as that of 1682. And here the intervals are also nearly the same, namely, about seventy-five years. Are the three comets then identical? In looking back into the history of such appearances, he found comets recorded in 1456, in 1380, and in 1305; the intervals are still the same, seventy-five or seventy-six years. It was impossible now to doubt that they were the periods of a revolving body; that the comet was a planet; its orbit a long ellipse, not a parabola.[99]

[96] Bailly, ii. 246.

[97] Principia, ed. 1. p. 494.

[98] Bailly, ii. 646.

[99] The importance of Halley’s labors on Comets has always been acknowledged. In speaking of Halley’s Synopsis Astronomicæ Cometicæ, Delambre says (Ast. xviii. Siècle, p. 130), “Voilà bien, depuis Kepler, ce qu’on a fait de plus grand, de plus beau, de plus neuf en astronomie.” Halley, in predicting the comet of 1758, says, if it returns, “Hoc primum ab homine Anglo iuventum fuisse non inficiabitur æqua posteritas.”

But if this were so, the Comet must reappear in 1758 or 1759. Halley predicted that it would do so; and the fulfilment of this prediction was naturally looked forwards to, as an additional stamp of the truths of the theory of gravitation. [451]

But in all this, the Comet had been supposed to be affected only by the attraction of the sun. The planets must disturb its motion as they disturb each other. How would this disturbance affect the time and circumstances of its reappearance? Halley had proposed, but not attempted to solve, this question.

The effect of perturbations upon a comet defeats all known methods of approximation, and requires immense labor. “Clairaut,” says Bailly,[100] “undertook this: with courage enough to dare the adventure, he had talent enough to obtain a memorable victory;” the difficulties, the labors, grew upon him as he advanced, but he fought his way through them, assisted by Lalande, and by a female calculator, Madame Lepaute. He predicted that the comet would reach its perihelion April 13, 1759, but claimed the license of a month for the inevitable inaccuracy of a calculation which, in addition to all other sources of error, was made in haste, that it might appear as a prediction. The comet justified his calculations and his caution together; for it arrived at its perihelion on the 13th of March.

[100] Bailly, A. M. iii. 190.

Two other Comets, of much shorter period, have been detected of late years; Encke’s, which revolves round the sun in three years and one-third, and Biela’s which describes an ellipse, not extremely eccentric, in six years and three-quarters. These bodies, apparently thin and vaporous masses, like other comets, have, since their orbits were calculated, punctually conformed to the law of gravitation. If it were still doubtful whether the more conspicuous comets do so, these bodies would tend to prove the fact, by showing it to be true in an intermediate case.

[2d Ed.] [A third Comet of short period was discovered by Faye, at the Observatory of Paris, Nov. 22, 1843. It is included between the orbits of Mars and Saturn, and its period is seven years and three-tenths.

This is commonly called Faye’s Comet, as the two mentioned in the text are called Encke’s and Biela’s. In the former edition I had expressed my assent to the rule proposed by M. Arago, that the latter ought to be called Gambart’s Comet, in honor of the astronomer who first proved it to revolve round the Sun. But astronomers in general have used the former name, considering that the discovery and observation of the object are more distinct and conspicuous merits than a calculation founded upon the observations of others. And in reality [452] Biela had great merit in the discovery of his Comet’s periodicity, having set about his search of it from an anticipation of its return founded upon former observations.

Also a Comet was discovered by De Vico at Rome on Aug. 22, 1844, which was found to describe an elliptical orbit having its aphelion near the orbit of Jupiter, which is consequently one of those of short period. And on Feb. 26, 1846, M. Brorsen of Kiel discovered a telescopic Comet whose orbit is found to be elliptical.]

We may add to the history of Comets, that of Lexell’s, which, in 1770, appeared to be revolving in a period of about five years, and whose motion was predicted accordingly. The prediction was disappointed; but the failure was sufficiently explained by the comet’s having passed close to Jupiter, by which occurrence its orbit was utterly deranged.

It results from the theory of universal gravitation, that Comets are collections of extremely attenuated matter. Lexell’s is supposed to have passed twice (in 1767 and 1779) through the system of Jupiter’s Satellites, without disturbing their motions, though suffering itself so great a disturbance as to have its orbit entirely altered. The same result is still more decidedly proved by the last appearance of Biela’s Comet. It appeared double, but the two bodies did not perceptibly affect each other’s motions, as I am informed by Professor Challis of Cambridge, who observed both of them from Jan. 23 to Mar. 25, 1846. This proves the quantity of matter in each body to have been exceedingly small.

Thus, no verification of the Newtonian theory, which was possible in the motions of the stars, has yet been wanting. The return of Halley’s Comet again in 1835, and the extreme exactitude with which it conformed to its predicted course, is a testimony of truth, which must appear striking even to the most incurious respecting such matters.[101]

[101] M. de Humboldt (Kosmos, p. 116) speaks of nine returns of Halley’s Comet, the comet observed in China in 1378 being identified with this. But whether we take 1378 or 1380 for the appearance in that century, if we begin with that, we have only seven appearances, namely, in 1378 or 1380, in 1456, in 1531, in 1607, in 1682, in 1759, and in 1835.

Sect. 7.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to the Figure of the Earth.

The Heavens had thus been consulted respecting the Newtonian doctrine, and the answer given, over and over again, in a thousand [453] different forms, had been, that it was true; nor had the most persevering cross-examination been able to establish any thing of contradiction or prevarication. The same question was also to be put to the Earth and the Ocean, and we must briefly notice the result.

According to the Newtonian principles, the form of the earth must be a globe somewhat flattened at the poles. This conclusion, or at least the amount of the flattening, depends not only upon the existence and law of attraction, but upon its belonging to each particle of the mass separately; and thus the experimental confirmation of the form asserted from calculation, would be a verification of the theory in its widest sense. The application of such a test was the more necessary to the interests of science, inasmuch as the French astronomers had collected from their measures, and had connected with their Cartesian system, the opinion that the earth was not oblate but oblong. Dominic Cassini had measured seven degrees of latitude from Amiens to Perpignan, in 1701, and found them to decrease in going from south to north. The prolongation of this measure to Dunkirk confirmed the same result. But if the Newtonian doctrine was true, the contrary ought to be the case, and the degrees ought to increase in proceeding towards the pole.

The only answer which the Newtonians could at this time make to the difficulty thus presented, was, that an arc so short as that thus measured, was not to be depended upon for the determination of such a question; inasmuch as the inevitable errors of observation might exceed the differences which were the object of research. It would, undoubtedly, have become the English to have given a more complete answer, by executing measurements under circumstances not liable to this uncertainty. The glory of doing this, however, they for a long time abandoned to other nations. The French undertook the task with great spirit.[102] In 1733, in one of the meetings of the French Academy, when this question was discussed, De la Condamine, an ardent and eager man, proposed to settle this question by sending members of the Academy to measure a degree of the meridian near the equator, in order to compare it with the French degrees, and offered himself for the expedition. Maupertuis, in like manner, urged the necessity of another expedition to measure a degree in the neighborhood of the pole. The government received the applications favorably, and these remarkable scientific missions were sent out at the national expense.

[102] Bailly, iii. 11.

[454] As soon as the result of these measurements was known, there was no longer any doubt as to the fact of the earth’s oblateness, and the question only turned upon its quantity. Even before the return of the academicians, the Cassinis and Lacaille had measured the French arc, and found errors which subverted the former result, making the earth oblate to the amount of ¹⁄₁₆₈th of its diameter. The expeditions to Peru and to Lapland had to struggle with difficulties in the execution of their design, which make their narratives resemble some romantic history of irregular warfare, rather than the monotonous records of mere measurements. The equatorial degree employed the observers not less than eight years. When they did return, and the results were compared, their discrepancy, as to quantity, was considerable. The comparison of the Peruvian and French arcs gave an ellipticity of nearly ¹⁄₃₁₄th, that of the Peruvian and Swedish arcs gave ¹⁄₂₁₃th for its value.

Newton had deduced from his theory, by reasonings of singular ingenuity, an ellipticity of ¹⁄₂₃₀th; but this result had been obtained by supposing the earth homogeneous. If the earth be, as we should most readily conjecture it to be, more dense in its interior than at its exterior, its ellipticity will be less than that of a homogeneous spheroid revolving in the same time. It does not appear that Newton was aware of this; but Clairaut, in 1743, in his Figure of the Earth, proved this and many other important results of the attraction of the particles. Especially he established that, in proportion as the fraction expressing the Ellipticity becomes smaller, that expressing the Excess of the polar over the equatorial gravity becomes larger; and he thus connected the measures of the ellipticity obtained by means of Degrees, with those obtained by means of Pendulums in different latitudes.

The altered rate of a Pendulum when carried towards the equator, had been long ago observed by Richer and Halley, and had been quoted by Newton as confirmatory of his theory. Pendulums were swung by the academicians who measured the degrees, and confirmed the general character of the results.

But having reached this point of the verification of the Newtonian theory, any additional step becomes more difficult. Many excellent measures, both of Degrees and of Pendulums, have been made since those just mentioned. The results of the Arcs[103] is an Ellipticity of ¹⁄₂₉₈th;—of the Pendulums, an Ellipticity of about ¹⁄₂₈₅th. This difference [455] is considerable, if compared with the quantities themselves; but does not throw a shadow of doubt on the truth of the theory. Indeed, the observations of each kind exhibit irregularities which we may easily account for, by ascribing them to the unknown distribution of the denser portions of the earth; but which preclude the extreme of accuracy and certainty in our result.

[103] Airy, Fig. Earth, p. 230.

But the near agreement of the determination, from Degrees and from Pendulums, is not the only coincidence by which the doctrine is confirmed. We can trace the effect of the earth’s Oblateness in certain minute apparent motions of the stars; for the attraction of the sun and moon on the protuberant matter of the spheroid produces the Precession of the equinoxes, and a Nutation of the earth’s axis. The Precession had been known from the time of Hipparchus, and the existence of Nutation was foreseen by Newton; but the quantity is so small, that it required consummate skill and great labor in Bradley to detect it by astronomical observation. Being, however, so detected, its amount, as well as that of the Precession, gives us the means of determining the amount of Terrestrial Ellipticity, by which the effect is produced. But it is found, upon calculation, that we cannot obtain this determination without assuming some law of density in the homogeneous strata of which we suppose the earth to consist[104] The density will certainly increase in proceeding towards the centre, and there is a simple and probable law of this increase, which will give ¹⁄₃₀₀th for the Ellipticity, from the amount of two lunar Inequalities (one in latitude and one in longitude), which are produced by the earth’s oblateness. Nearly the same result follows from the quantity of Nutation. Thus every thing tends to convince us that the ellipticity cannot deviate much from this fraction.

[104] Airy, Fig. Earth, p. 235.

[2d Ed.] [I ought not to omit another class of phenomena in which the effects of the Earth’s Oblateness, acting according to the law of universal gravitation, have manifested themselves;—I speak of the Moon’s Motion, as affected by the Earth’s Ellipticity. In this case, as in most others, observation anticipated theory. Mason had inferred from lunar observations a certain Inequality in Longitude, depending upon the distance of the Moon’s Node from the Equinox. Doubts were entertained by astronomers whether this inequality really existed; but Laplace showed that such an inequality would arise from the oblate form of the earth; and that its magnitude might serve to [456] determine the amount of the oblateness. Laplace showed, at the same time, that along with this Inequality in Longitude there must be an Inequality in Latitude; and this assertion Burg confirmed by the discussion of observations. The two Inequalities, as shown in the observations, agree in assigning to the earth’s form an Ellipticity of ¹⁄₃₀₅th.]

Sect. 8.—Confirmation of the Newtonian Theory by Experiments on Attraction.

The attraction of all the parts of the earth to one another was thus proved by experiments, in which the whole mass of the earth is concerned. But attempts have also been made to measure the attraction of smaller portions; as mountains, or artificial masses. This is an experiment of great difficulty; for the attraction of such masses must be compared with that of the earth, of which it is a scarcely perceptible fraction; and, moreover, in the case of mountains, the effect of the mountain will be modified or disguised by unknown or unappreciable circumstances. In many of the measurements of degrees, indications of the attraction of mountains had been perceived; but at the suggestion of Maskelyne, the experiment was carefully made, in 1774, upon the mountain Schehallien, in Scotland, the mountain being mineralogically surveyed by Playfair. The result obtained was, that the attraction of the mountain drew the plumb-line about six seconds from the vertical; and it was deduced from this, by Hutton’s calculations, that the density of the earth was about once and four-fifths that of Schehallien, or four and a half times that of water.

Cavendish, who had suggested many of the artifices in this calculation, himself made the experiment in the other form, by using leaden balls, about nine inches diameter. This observation was conducted with an extreme degree of ingenuity and delicacy, which could alone make it valuable; and the result agreed very nearly with that of the Schehallien experiment, giving for the density of the earth about five and one-third times that of water. Nearly the same result was obtained by Carlini, in 1824, from observations of the pendulum, made at a point of the Alps (the Hospice, on Mount Cenis) at a considerable elevation above the average surface of the earth. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~ [457]

Sect. 9.—Application of the Newtonian Theory to the Tides.

We come, finally, to that result, in which most remains to be done for the verification of the general law of attraction—the subject of the Tides. Yet, even here, the verification is striking, as far as observations have been carried. Newton’s theory explained, with singular felicity, all the prominent circumstances of the tides then known;—the difference of spring and neap tides; the effect of the moon’s and sun’s declination and parallax; even the difference of morning and evening tides, and the anomalous tides of particular places. About, and after, this time, attempts were made both by the Royal Society of England, and by the French Academy, to collect numerous observations but these were not followed up with sufficient perseverance. Perhaps, indeed, the theory had not been at that time sufficiently developed but the admirable prize-essays of Euler, Bernoulli, and D’Alembert, in 1740, removed, in a great measure, this deficiency. These dissertations supplied the means of bringing this subject to the same test to which all the other consequences of gravitation had been subjected;—namely, the calculation of tables, and the continued and orderly comparison of these with observation. Laplace has attempted this verification in another way, by calculating the results of the theory (which he has done with an extraordinary command of analysis), and then by comparing these, in supposed critical cases, with the Brest observations. This method has confirmed the theory as far as it could do so; but such a process cannot supersede the necessity of applying the proper criterion of truth in such cases, the construction and verification of Tables. Bernoulli’s theory, on the other hand, has been used for the construction of Tide-tables; but these have not been properly compared with experiment; and when the comparison has been made, having been executed for purposes of gain rather than of science, it has not been published, and cannot be quoted as a verification of the theory.

Thus we have, as yet, no sufficient comparison of fact with theory, for Laplace’s is far from a complete comparison. In this, as in other parts of physical astronomy, our theory ought not only to agree with observations selected and grouped in a particular manner, but with the whole course of observation, and with every part of the phenomena. In this, as in other cases, the true theory should be verified by its giving us the best Tables; but Tide-tables were never, I believe, [458] calculated upon Laplace’s theory, and thus it was never fairly brought to the test.

It is, perhaps, remarkable, considering all the experience which astronomy had furnished, that men should have expected to reach the completion of this branch of science by improving the mathematical theory, without, at the same time, ascertaining the laws of the facts. In all other departments of astronomy, as, for instance, in the cases of the moon and the planets, the leading features of the phenomena had been made out empirically, before the theory explained them. The course which analogy would have recommended for the cultivation of our knowledge of the tides, would have been, to ascertain, by an analysis of long series of observations, the effect of changes in the time of transit, parallax, and declination of the moon, and thus to obtain the laws of phenomena and then proceed to investigate the laws of causation.

Though this was not the course followed by mathematical theorists, it was really pursued by those who practically calculated Tide-tables; and the application of knowledge to the useful purposes of life being thus separated from the promotion of the theory, was naturally treated as a gainful property, and preserved by secrecy. Art, in this instance, having cast off her legitimate subordination to Science, or rather, being deprived of the guidance which it was the duty of Science to afford, resumed her ancient practices of exclusiveness and mystery. Liverpool, London, and other places, had their Tide-tables, constructed by undivulged methods, which methods, in some instances at least, were handed down from father to son for several generations as a family possession; and the publication of new Tables, accompanied by a statement of the mode of calculation, was resented as an infringement of the rights of property.

The mode in which these secret methods were invented, was that which we have pointed out;—the analysis of a considerable series of observations. Probably the best example of this was afforded by the Liverpool Tide-tables. These were deduced by a clergyman named Holden, from observations made at that port by a harbor-master of the name of Hutchinson; who was led, by a love of such pursuits, to observe the tides carefully for above twenty years, day and night. Holden’s Tables, founded on four years of these observations, were remarkably accurate.

At length men of science began to perceive that such calculations were part of their business; and that they were called upon, as the [459] guardians of the established theory of the universe, to compare it in the greatest possible detail with the facts. Mr. Lubbock was the first mathematician who undertook the extensive labors which such a conviction suggested. Finding that regular tide-observations had been made at the London Docks from 1795, he took nineteen years of these (purposely selecting the length of a cycle of the motions of the lunar orbit), and caused them (in 1831) to be analyzed by Mr. Dessiou, an expert calculator. He thus obtained[105] Tables for the effect of the Moon’s Declination, Parallax, and hour of Transit, on the tides; and was enabled to produce Tide-tables founded upon the data thus obtained. Some mistakes in these as first published (mistakes unimportant as to the theoretical value of the work), served to show the jealousy of the practical tide-table calculators, by the acrimony with which the oversights were dwelt upon; but in a very few years, the tables thus produced by an open and scientific process were more exact than those which resulted from any of the secrets; and thus practice was brought into its proper subordination to theory.

[105] Phil. Trans. 1831. British Almanac, 1832.

The theory with which Mr. Lubbock was led to compare his results, was the Equilibrium-theory of Daniel Bernoulli; and it was found that this theory, with certain modifications of its elements, represented the facts to a remarkable degree of precision. Mr. Lubbock pointed out this agreement especially in the semi-mensual inequality of the times of high water. The like agreement was afterwards (in 1833) shown by Mr. Whewell[106] to obtain still more accurately at Liverpool, both for the Times and Heights; for by this time, nineteen years of Hutchinson’s Liverpool Observations had also been discussed by Mr. Lubbock. The other inequalities of the Times and Heights (depending upon the Declination and Parallax of the Moon and Sun,) were variously compared with the Equilibrium-theory by Mr. Lubbock and Mr. Whewell; and the general result was, that the facts agreed with the condition of equilibrium at a certain anterior time, but that this anterior time was different for different phenomena. In like manner it appeared to follow from these researches, that in order to explain the facts, the mass of the moon must be supposed different in the calculation at different places. A result in effect the same was obtained by M. Daussy,[107] an active French Hydrographer; for he found that observations at various stations could not be reconciled with the formulæ of Laplace’s Mécanique [460] Céleste (in which the ratio of the heights of spring-tides and neap-tides was computed on an assumed mass of the moon) without an alteration of level which was, in fact, equivalent to an alteration of the moon’s mass. Thus all things appeared to tend to show that the Equilibrium-theory would give the formulæ for the inequalities of the tides, but that the magnitudes which enter into these formulæ must be sought from observation.

[106] Phil. Trans. 1834.

[107] Connaissance des Tems, 1838.

Whether this result is consistent with theory, is a question not so much of Physical Astronomy as of Hydrodynamics, and has not yet been solved. A Theory of the Tides which should include in its conditions the phenomena of Derivative Tides, and of their combinations, will probably require all the resources of the mathematical mechanician.

As a contribution of empirical materials to the treatment of this hydrodynamical problem, it may be allowable to mention here Mr. Whewell’s attempts to trace the progress of the tide into all the seas of the globe, by drawing on maps of the ocean what he calls Cotidal Lines;—lines marking the contemporaneous position of the various points of the great wave which carries high water from shore to shore.[108] This is necessarily a task of labor and difficulty, since it requires us to know the time of high water on the same day in every part of the world; but in proportion as it is completed, it supplies steps between our general view of the movements of the ocean and the phenomena of particular ports.

[108] Essay towards a First Approximation to a Map of Cotidal Lines. Phil. Trans. 1833, 1836.

Looking at this subject by the light which the example of the history of astronomy affords, we may venture to repeat, that it will never have justice done it till it is treated as other parts of astronomy are treated; that is, till Tables of all the phenomena which can be observed, are calculated by means of the best knowledge which we at present possess, and till these tables are constantly improved by a comparison of the predicted with the observed fact. A set of Tide-observations and Tide-ephemerides of this kind, would soon give to this subject that precision which marks the other parts of astronomy; and would leave an assemblage of unexplained residual phenomena, in which a careful research might find the materials of other truths as yet unsuspected.

[2d Ed.] [That there would be, in the tidal movements of the ocean, inequalities of the heights and times of high and low water [461] corresponding to those which the equilibrium theory gives, could be considered only as a conjecture, till the comparison with observation was made. It was, however, a natural conjecture; since the waters of the ocean are at every moment tending to acquire the form assumed in the equilibrium theory: and it may be considered likely that the causes which prevent their assuming this form produce an effect nearly constant for each place. Whatever be thought of this reasoning, the conjecture is confirmed by observation with curious exactness. The laws of a great number of the tidal phenomena—namely, of the Semi-mensual Inequality of the Heights, of the Semi-mensual Inequality of the Times, of the Diurnal Inequality, of the effect of the Moon’s Declination, of the effect of the Moon’s Parallax—are represented very closely by formulæ derived from the equilibrium theory. The hydrodynamical mode of treating the subject has not added any thing to the knowledge of the laws of the phenomena to which the other view had conducted us.

We may add, that Laplace’s assumption, that in the moving fluid the motions must have a periodicity corresponding to that of the forces, is also a conjecture. And though this conjecture may, in some cases of the problem, be verified, by substituting the resulting expressions in the equations of motion, this cannot be done in the actual case, where the revolving motion of the ocean is prevented by the intrusion of tracts of land running nearly from pole to pole.

Yet in Mr. Airy’s Treatise On Tides and Waves (in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana) much has been done to bring the hydrodynamical theory of oceanic tides into agreement with observation. In this admirable work, Mr. Airy has, by peculiar artifices, solved problems which come so near the actual cases that they may represent them. He has, in this way, deduced the laws of the semi-diurnal and the diurnal tide, and the other features of the tides which the equilibrium theory in some degree imitates; but he has also, taking into account the effect of friction, shown that the actual tide may be represented as the tide of an earlier epoch;—that the relative mass of the moon and sun, as inferred from the tides, would depend upon the depth of the ocean (Art. 455);—with many other results remarkably explaining the observed phenomena. He has also shown that the relation of the cotidal lines to the tide waves really propagated is, in complex cases, very obscure, because different waves of different magnitudes, travelling in different directions, may coexist, and the cotidal line is the compound result of all these. [462]

With reference to the Maps of Cotidal Lines, mentioned in the text, I may add, that we are as yet destitute of observations which should supply the means of drawing such lines on a large scale in the Pacific Ocean. Admiral Lütke has however supplied us with some valuable materials and remarks on this subject in his Notice sur les Marées Périodiques dans le grand Océan Boréal et dans la Mer Glaciale; and has drawn them, apparently on sufficient data, in the White Sea.] ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~

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CHAPTER V.
Discoveries added to the Newtonian Theory.

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Sect. 1.—Tables of Astronomical Refraction.

WE have travelled over an immense field of astronomical and mathematical labor in the last few pages, and have yet, at the end of every step, still found ourselves under the jurisdiction of the Newtonian laws. We are reminded of the universal monarchies, where a man could not escape from the empire without quitting the world. We have now to notice some other discoveries, in which this reference to the law of universal gravitation is less immediate and obvious; I mean the astronomical discoveries respecting Light.

The general truths to which the establishment of the true laws of Atmospheric Refraction led astronomers, were the law of Deflection of the rays of light, which applies to all refractions, and the real structure and size of the Atmosphere, so far as it became known. The great discoveries of Römer and Bradley, namely, the Velocity of Light, the Aberration of Light, and the Nutation of the earth’s axis, gave a new distinctness to the conceptions of the propagation of light in the minds of philosophers, and confirmed the doctrines of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, respecting the motions which belong to the earth.

The true laws of Atmospheric Refraction were slowly discovered. Tycho attributed the apparent displacement of the heavenly bodies to the low and gross part of the atmosphere only, and hence made it cease at a point half-way to the zenith; but Kepler rightly extended it to the zenith itself. Dominic Cassini endeavored to discover the law of this correction by observation, and gave his result in the form [463] which, as we have said, sound science prescribes, a Table to be habitually used for all observations. But great difficulties at this time embarrassed this investigation, for the parallaxes of the sun and of the planets were unknown, and very diverse values had been assigned them by different astronomers. To remove some of these difficulties, Richer, in 1762, went to observe at the equator; and on his return, Cassini was able to confirm and amend his former estimations of parallax and refraction. But there were still difficulties. According to La Hire, though the phenomena of twilight give an altitude of 34,000 toises to the atmosphere,[109] those of refraction make it only 2000. John Cassini undertook to support and improve the calculations of his father Dominic, and took the true supposition, that the light follows a curvilinear path through the air. The Royal Society of London had already ascertained experimentally the refractive power of air.[110] Newton calculated a Table of Refractions, which was published under Halley’s name in the Philosophical Transactions for 1721, without any indication of the method by which it was constructed. But M. Biot has recently shown,[111] by means of the published correspondence of Flamsteed, that Newton had solved the problem in a manner nearly corresponding to the most improved methods of modern analysis.

[109] Bailly, ii. 612.

[110] Ibid. ii. 607.

[111] Biot, Acad. Sc. Compte Rendu, Sept. 5, 1836.

Dominic Cassini and Picard proved,[112] Le Monnier in 1738 confirmed more fully, the fact that the variations of the Thermometer affect the Refraction. Mayer, taking into account both these changes, and the changes indicated by the Barometer, formed a theory, which Lacaille, with immense labor, applied to the construction of a Table of Refractions from observation. But Bradley’s Table (published in 1763 by Maskelyne) was more commonly adopted in England; and his formula, originally obtained empirically, has been shown by Young to result from the most probable suppositions we can make respecting the atmosphere. Bessel’s Refraction Tables are now considered the best of those which have appeared.

[112] Bailly, iii. 92.

Sect. 2.—Discovery of the Velocity of Light.—Römer.

The astronomical history of Refraction is not marked by any great discoveries, and was, for the most part, a work of labor only. The progress of the other portions of our knowledge respecting light is [464] more striking. In 1676, a great number of observations of eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites were accumulated, and could be compared with Cassini’s Tables. Römer, a Danish astronomer, whom Picard had brought to Paris, perceived that these eclipses happened constantly later than the calculated time at one season of the year, and earlier at another season;—a difference for which astronomy could offer no account. The error was the same for all the satellites; if it had depended on a defect in the Tables of Jupiter, it might have affected all, but the effect would have had a reference to the velocities of the satellites. The cause, then, was something extraneous to Jupiter. Römer had the happy thought of comparing the error with the earth’s distance from Jupiter, and it was found that the eclipses happened later in proportion as Jupiter was further off.[113] Thus we see the eclipse later, as it is more remote; and thus light, the messenger which brings us intelligence of the occurrence, travels over its course in a measurable time. By this evidence, light appeared to take about eleven minutes in describing the diameter of the earth’s orbit.

[113] Bailly, ii. 17.

This discovery, like so many others, once made, appears easy and inevitable; yet Dominic Cassini had entertained the idea for a moment,[114] and had rejected it; and Fontenelle had congratulated himself publicly on having narrowly escaped this seductive error. The objections to the admission of the truth arose principally from the inaccuracy of observation, and from the persuasion that the motions of the satellites were circular and uniform. Their irregularities disguised the fact in question. As these irregularities became clearly known, Römer’s discovery was finally established, and the “Equation of Light” took its place in the Tables.

[114] Ib. ii. 419.

Sect. 3.—Discovery of Aberration.—Bradley.

Improvements in instruments, and in the art of observing, were requisite for making the next great step in tracing the effect of the laws of light. It appears clear, on consideration, that since light and the spectator on the earth are both in motion, the apparent direction of an object will be determined by the composition of these motions. But yet the effect of this composition of motions was (as is usual in such cases) traced as a fact in observation, before it was clearly seen as a consequence of reasoning. This fact, the Aberration of Light, the greatest astronomical discovery of the eighteenth century, belongs to Bradley, [465] who was then Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, and afterwards Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. Molyneux and Bradley, in 1725, began a series of observations for the purpose of ascertaining, by observations near the zenith, the existence of an annual parallax of the fixed stars, which Hooke had hoped to detect, and Flamsteed thought he had discovered. Bradley[115] soon found that the star observed by him had a minute apparent motion different from that which the annual parallax would produce. He thought of a nutation of the earth’s axis as a mode of accounting for this; but found, by comparison of a star on the other side of the pole, that this explanation would not apply. Bradley and Molyneux then considered for a moment an annual alteration of figure in the earth’s atmosphere, such as might affect the refractions, but this hypothesis was soon rejected.[116] In 1727, Bradley resumed his observations, with a new instrument, at Wanstead, and obtained empirical rules for the changes of declination of different stars. At last, accident turned his thoughts to the direction in which he was to find the cause of the variations which he had discovered. Being in a boat on the Thames, he observed that the vane on the top of the mast gave a different apparent direction to the wind, as the boat sailed one way or the other. Here was an image of his case: the boat represented the earth moving in different directions at different seasons, and the wind represented the light of a star. He had now to trace the consequences of this idea; he found that it led to the empirical rules, which he had already discovered, and, in 1729, he gave his discovery to the Royal Society. His paper is a very happy narrative of his labors and his thoughts. His theory was so sound that no astronomer ever contested it; and his observations were so accurate, that the quantity which he assigned as the greatest amount of the change (one nineteenth of a degree) has hardly been corrected by more recent astronomers. It must be noticed, however, that he considered the effects in declination only; the effects in right ascension required a different mode of observation, and a consummate goodness in the machinery of clocks, which at that time was hardly attained.

[115] Rigaud’s Bradley.

[116] Rigaud, p. xxiii.

Sect. 4.—Discovery of Nutation.

When Bradley went to Greenwich as Astronomer Royal, he continued with perseverance observations of the same kind as those by which he had detected Aberration. The result of these was another [466] discovery; namely, that very Nutation which he had formerly rejected. This may appear strange, but it is easily explained. The aberration is an annual change, and is detected by observing a star at different seasons of the year: the Nutation is a change of which the cycle is eighteen years; and which, therefore, though it does not much change the place of a star in one year, is discoverable in the alterations of several successive years. A very few years’ observations showed Bradley the effect of this change;[117] and long before the half cycle of nine years had elapsed, he had connected it in his mind with the true cause, the motion of the moon’s nodes. Machin was then Secretary to the Royal Society,[118] and was “employed in considering the theory of gravity, and its consequences with regard to the celestial motions:” to him Bradley communicated his conjectures; from him he soon received a Table containing the results of his calculations; and the law was found to be the same in the Table and in observation, though the quantities were somewhat different. It appeared by both, that the earth’s pole, besides the motion which the precession of the equinoxes gives it, moves, in eighteen years, through a small circle;—or rather, as was afterwards found by Bradley, an ellipse, of which the axes are nineteen and fourteen seconds.[119]

[117] Rigaud, lxiv.

[118] Ib. 25.

[119] Ib. lxvi.

For the rigorous establishment of the mechanical theory of that effect of the moon’s attraction from which the phenomena of Nutation flow, Bradley rightly and prudently invited the assistance of the great mathematicians of his time. D’Alembert, Thomas Simpson, Euler, and others, answered this call, and the result was, as we have already said in the last chapter ([Sect. 7]), that this investigation added another to the recondite and profound evidences of the doctrine of universal gravitation.

It has been said[120] that Bradley’s discoveries “assure him the most distinguished place among astronomers after Hipparchus and Kepler.” If his discoveries had been made before Newton’s, there could have been no hesitation as to placing him on a level with those great men. The existence of such suggestions as the Newtonian theory offered on all astronomical subjects, may perhaps dim, in our eyes, the brilliance of Bradley’s achievements; but this circumstance cannot place any other person above the author of such discoveries, and therefore we may consider Delambre’s adjudication of precedence as well warranted, and deserving to be permanent.

[120] Delambre, Ast. du 18 Sièc. p. 420. Rigaud, xxxvii. [467]

Sect. 5.—Discovery of the Laws of Double Stars.—The two Herschels.

No truth, then, can be more certainly established, than that the law of gravitation prevails to the very boundaries of the solar system. But does it hold good further? Do the fixed stars also obey this universal sway? The idea, the question, is an obvious one—but where are we to find the means of submitting it to the test of observation?

If the Stars were each insulated from the rest, as our Sun appears to be from them, we should have been quite unable to answer this inquiry. But among the stars, there are some which are called Double Stars, and which consist of two stars, so near to each other that the telescope alone can separate them. The elder Herschel diligently observed and measured the relative positions of the two stars in such pairs; and as has so often happened in astronomical history, pursuing one object he fell in with another. Supposing such pairs to be really unconnected, he wished to learn, from their phenomena, something respecting the annual parallax of the earth’s orbit. But in the course of twenty years’ observations he made the discovery (in 1803) that some of these couples were turning round each other with various angular velocities. These revolutions were for the most part so slow that he was obliged to leave their complete determination as an inheritance to the next generation. His son was not careless of the bequest, and after having added an enormous mass of observations to those of his father, he applied himself to determine the laws of these revolutions. A problem so obvious and so tempting was attacked also by others, as Savary and Encke, in 1830 and 1832, with the resources of analysis. But a problem in which the data are so minute and inevitably imperfect, required the mathematician to employ much judgment, as well as skill in using and combining these data; and Sir John Herschel, by employing positions only of the line joining the pair of stars (which can be observed with comparative exactness), to the exclusion of their distances (which cannot be measured with much correctness), and by inventing a method which depended upon the whole body of observations, and not upon selected ones only, for the determination of the motion, has made his investigations by far the most satisfactory of those which have appeared. The result is, that it has been rendered very probable, that in several of the double stars the two stars describe ellipses about each other; and therefore that here also, at an [468] immeasurable distance from our system, the law of attraction according to the inverse square of the distance, prevails. And, according to the practice of astronomers when a law has been established, Tables have been calculated for the future motions; and we have Ephemerides of the revolutions of suns round each other, in a region so remote, that the whole circle of our earth’s orbit, if placed there, would be imperceptible by our strongest telescopes. The permanent comparison of the observed with the predicted motions, continued for more than one revolution, is the severe and decisive test of the truth of the theory; and the result of this test astronomers are now awaiting.

[2d Ed.] [In calculating the orbits of revolving systems of double stars, there is a peculiar difficulty, arising from the plane of the orbit being in a position unknown, but probably oblique, to the visual ray. Hence it comes to pass that even if the orbit be an ellipse described about the focus by the laws of planetary motion, it will appear otherwise; and the true orbit will have to be deduced from the apparent one.

With regard to a difficulty which has been mentioned, that the two stars, if they are governed by gravity, will not revolve the one about the other, but both about their common centre of gravity;—this circumstance adds little difficulty to the problem. Newton has shown (Princip. lib. i. Prop. 61) in the problem of two bodies, the relation between the relative orbits and the orbit about the common centre of gravity.

How many of the apparently double stars have orbitual motions? Sir John Herschel in 1833 gave, in his Astronomy (Art. 606), a list of nine stars, with periods extending from 43 years (η Coronæ) to 1200 years (γ Leonis), which he presented as the chief results then obtained in this department. In his work on Double Stars, the fruit of his labors in both hemispheres, which the astronomical world are looking for with eager expectation, he will, I believe, have a few more to add to these.

Is it well established that such double stars attract each other according to the law of the inverse square of the distance? The answer to this question must be determined by ascertaining whether the above cases are regulated by the laws of elliptical motion. This is a matter which it must require a long course of careful observation to determine in such a number of cases as to prove the universality of the rule. Perhaps the minds of astronomers are still in suspense upon the subject. When Sir John Herschel’s work shall appear, it will probably [469] be found that with regard to some of these stars, and γ Virginis in particular, the conformity of the observations with the laws of elliptical motion amounts to a degree of exactness which must give astronomers a strong conviction of the truth of the law. For since Sir W. Herschel’s first measures in 1781, the arc described by one star about the other is above 305 degrees; and during this period the angular annual motion has been very various, passing through all gradations from about 20 minutes to 80 degrees. Yet in the whole of this change, the two curves constructed, the one from the observations, the other from the elliptical elements, for the purpose of comparison, having a total ordinate of 305 parts, do not, in any part of their course, deviate from each other so much as two such parts.]

The verification of Newton’s discoveries was sufficient employment for the last century; the first step in the extension of them belongs to this century. We cannot at present foresee the magnitude of this task, but every one must feel that the law of gravitation, before verified in all the particles of our own system, and now probably extended to the all but infinite distance of the fixed stars, presses upon our minds with a strong claim to be accepted as a universal law of the whole material creation.

Thus, in this and the preceding chapter, I have given a brief sketch of the history of the verification and extension of Newton’s great discovery. By the mass of labor and of skill which this head of our subject includes, we may judge of the magnitude of the advance in our knowledge which that discovery made. A wonderful amount of talent and industry have been requisite for this purpose; but with these, external means have co-operated. Wealth, authority, mechanical skill, the division of labor, the power of associations and of governments, have been largely and worthily applied in bringing astronomy to its present high and flourishing condition. We must consider briefly what has thus been done. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~ [470]

CHAPTER VI.
The Instruments and Aids of Astronomy during the Newtonian Period.

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Sect. 1.—Instruments.

SOME instruments or other were employed at all periods of astronomical observation. But it was only when observation had attained a considerable degree of delicacy, that the exact construction of instruments became an object of serious care. Gradually, as the possibility and the value of increased exactness became manifest, it was seen that every thing which could improve the astronomer’s instruments was of high importance to him. And hence in some cases a vast increase of size and of expense was introduced; in other cases new combinations, or the result of improvements in other sciences, were brought into play. Extensive knowledge, intense thought, and great ingenuity, were requisite in the astronomical instrument maker. Instead of ranking with artisans, he became a man of science, sharing the honor and dignity of the astronomer himself.

1. Measure of Angles.—Tycho Brahe was the first astronomer who acted upon a due appreciation of the importance of good instruments. The collection of such at Uraniburg was by far the finest which had ever existed. He endeavored to give steadiness to the frame, and accuracy to the divisions of his instruments. His Mural Quadrant was well adapted for this purpose; its radius was five cubits: it is clear, that as we enlarge the instrument we are enabled to measure smaller arcs. On this principle many large gnomons were erected. Cassini’s celebrated one in the church of St. Petronius at Bologna, was eighty-three feet (French) high. But this mode of obtaining accuracy was soon abandoned for better methods. Three great improvements were introduced about the same time. The application of the Micrometer to the telescope, by Huyghens, Malvasia, and Auzout; the application of the Telescope to the astronomical quadrant; and the fixation of the centre of its field by a Cross of fine wires placed in the focus by Gascoigne, and afterwards by Picard. We may judge how great was the improvement which these contrivances introduced into the art of [471] observing, by finding that Hevelius refused to adopt them because they would make all the old observations of no value. He had spent a laborious and active life in the exercise of the old methods, and could not bear to think that all the treasures which he had accumulated had lost their worth by the discovery of a new mine of richer ore.

[2d Ed.] [Littrow, in his Die Wunder des Himmels, Ed. 2, pp. 684, 685, says that Gascoigne invented and used the telescope with wires in the common focus of the lenses in 1640. He refers to Phil. Trans. xxx. 603. Picard reinvented this arrangement in 1667. I have [ already] spoken of Gascoigne as the inventor of the micrometer.

Römer (already mentioned, [p. 464]) brought into use the Transit Instrument, and the employment of complete Circles, instead of the Quadrants used till then; and by these means gave to practical astronomy a new form, of which the full value was not discovered till long afterwards.]

The apparent place of the object in the instrument being so precisely determined by the new methods, the exact Division of the arc into degrees and their subdivisions became a matter of great consequence. A series of artists, principally English, have acquired distinguished places in the lists of scientific fame by their performances in this way; and from that period, particular instruments have possessed historical interest and individual reputation. Graham was one of the first of these artists. He executed a great Mural Arc for Halley at Greenwich; for Bradley he constructed the Sector which detected aberration. He also made the Sector which the French academicians carried to Lapland; and probably the goodness of this instrument, compared with the imperfection of those which were sent to Peru, was one main cause of the great difference of duration in the two series of observations. Bird, somewhat later[121] (about 1750), divided several Quadrants for public observatories. His method of dividing was considered so perfect, that the knowledge of it was purchased by the English government, and published in 1767. Ramsden was equally celebrated. The error of one of his best Quadrants (that at Padua) is said to be never greater than two seconds. But at a later period, Ramsden constructed Mural Circles only, holding this to be a kind of instrument far superior to the quadrant. He made one of five feet diameter, in 1788, for M. Piazzi at Palermo; and one of eight feet for the observatory of Dublin. Troughton, a worthy successor of the [472] artists we have mentioned, has invented a method of dividing the circle still superior to the former ones; indeed, one which is theoretically perfect, and practically capable of consummate accuracy. In this way, circles have been constructed for Greenwich, Armagh, Cambridge, and many other places; and probably this method, carefully applied, offers to the astronomer as much exactness as his other implements allow him to receive; but the slightest casualty happening to such an instrument, after it has been constructed, or any doubt whether the method of graduation has been rightly applied, makes it unfit for the jealous scrupulosity of modern astronomy.

[121] Mont. iv. 337.

The English artists sought to attain accurate measurements by continued bisection and other aliquot subdivision of the limb of their circle; but Mayer proposed to obtain this end otherwise, by repeating the measure on different parts of the circumference till the error of the division becomes unimportant, instead of attempting to divide an instrument without error. This invention of the Repeating Circle was zealously adopted by the French, and the relative superiority of the rival methods is still a matter of difference of opinion.

[2d Ed.] [In the series of these great astronomical mechanists, we must also reckon George Reichenbach. He was born Aug. 24, 1772, at Durlach; became Lieutenant of Artillery in the Bavarian service in 1794; (Salinenrath) Commissioner of Salt-works in 1811; and in 1820, First Commissioner of Water-works and Roads. He became, with Fraunhofer, the ornament of the mechanical and optical Institute erected in 1805 at Benedictbeuern by Utzschneider; and his astronomical instruments, meridian circles, transit instruments, equatorials, heliometers, make an epoch in Observing Astronomy. His contrivances in the Salt-works at Berchtesgaden and Reichenhall, in the Arms Manufactory at Amberg, and in the works for boring cannon at Vienna, are enduring monuments of his rare mechanical talent. He died May 21, 1826, at Munich.]

2. Clocks.—The improvements in the measures of space require corresponding improvements in the measure of time. The beginning of any thing which we can call accuracy, in this subject, was the application of the Pendulum to clocks, by Huyghens, in 1656. That the successive oscillations of a pendulum occupy equal times, had been noticed by Galileo; but in order to take advantage of this property, the pendulum must be connected with machinery by which its motion is kept from languishing, and by which the number of its swings is recorded. By inventing such machinery, Huyghens at once obtained [473] a measure of time more accurate than the sun itself. Hence astronomers were soon led to obtain the right ascension of a star, not directly, by measuring a Distance in the heavens, but indirectly, by observing the Moment of its Transit. This observation is now made with a degree of accuracy which might, at first sight, appear beyond the limits of human sense, being noted to a tenth of a second of time: but we may explain this, by remarking that though the number of the second at which the transit happens is given by the clock, and is reckoned according to the course of time, the subdivision of the second of time into smaller fractions is performed by the eye,—by seeing the space described by the heavenly body in a whole second, and hence estimating a smaller time, according to the space which its description occupies.

But in order to make clocks so accurate as to justify this degree of precision, their construction was improved by various persons in succession. Picard soon found that Huyghens’ clocks were affected in their going by temperature, for heat caused expansion of the metallic pendulum. This cause of error was remedied by combining different metals, as iron and copper, which expand in a different degree, in such a way that their effects compensate each other. Graham afterwards used quicksilver for the same purpose. The Escapement too (which connects the force which impels the clock with the pendulum which regulates it), and other parts of the machinery, had the most refined mechanical skill and ingenuity of the best artists constantly bestowed upon then. The astronomer of the present day, constantly testing the going of such a clock by the motions of the fixed stars, has a scale of time as stable and as minutely exact as the scales on which he measures distance.

The construction of good Watches, that is, portable or marine clocks, was important on another account, namely, because they might be used in determining the longitude of places. Hence the improvement of this little machine became an object of national interest, and was included in the reward of 20,000l., which we have already [noticed] as offered by the English parliament for the discovery of the longitude. Harrison,[122] originally a carpenter, turned his mind to this subject with success. After thirty years of labor, in which he was encouraged by many eminent persons, he produced, in 1758, a time-keeper, which was sent on a voyage to Jamaica for trial. After 161 days, the error [474] of the watch was only one minute five seconds, and the artist received from the nation 5000l. At a later period,[123] at the age of seventy-five years, after a life devoted to this object, having still further satisfied the commissioners, he received, in 1765, 10,000l., at the same time that Euler and the heirs of Mayer received each 3000l. for the lunar tables which they had constructed.

[122] Mont. iv. 554.

[123] Mont. iv. 560.

The two methods of finding the longitude, by Chronometers and by Lunar Observations, have solved the problem for all practical purposes; but the latter could not have been employed at sea without the aid of that invaluable instrument, the Sextant, in which the distance of two objects is observed, by bringing one to coincide apparently with the reflected image of the other. This instrument was invented by Hadley, in 1731. Though the problem of finding the longitude be, in fact, one of geography rather than astronomy, it is an application of astronomical science which has so materially affected the progress of our knowledge, that it deserves the notice we have bestowed upon it.

3. Telescopes.—We have spoken of the application of the telescope to astronomical measurements, but not of the improvement of the telescope itself. If we endeavor to augment the optical power of this instrument, we run, according to the path we take, into various inconveniences;—distortion, confusion, want of light, or colored images. Distortion and confusion are produced, if we increase the magnifying power, retaining the length and the aperture of the object-glass. If we diminish the aperture we suffer from loss of light. What remains then is to increase the focal length. This was done to an extraordinary extent, in telescopes constructed in the beginning of the last century. Huyghens, in his first attempts, made them 22 feet long;[124] afterwards, Campani, by order of Louis the Fourteenth, made them of 86, 100, and 136 feet. Huyghens, by new exertions, made a telescope 210 feet long. Auzout and Hartsoecker are said to have gone much further, and to have succeeded in making an object-glass of 600 feet focus. But even such telescopes as those of Campani are almost unmanageable: in that of Huyghens, the object-glass was placed on a pole, and the observer was placed at the focus with an eye-glass.

[124] Bailly, ii. 253.

The most serious objection to the increase of the aperture of object-glasses, was the coloration of the image produced, in consequence of the unequal refrangibility of differently colored rays. Newton, who discovered the principle of this defect in lenses, had maintained that [475] the evil was irremediable, and that a compound lens could no more refract without producing color, than a single lens could. Euler and Klingenstierna doubted the exactness of Newton’s proposition; and, in 1755, Dollond disproved it by experiment. This discovery pointed out a method of making object-glasses which should give no color;—which should be achromatic. For this purpose Dollond fabricated various kinds of glass (flint and crown glass); and Clairaut and D’Alembert calculated formulæ. Dollond and his son[125] succeeded in constructing telescopes of three feet long (with a triple object-glass) which produced an effect as great as those of forty-five feet on the ancient principles. At first it was conceived that these discoveries opened the way to a vast extension of the astronomer’s power of vision; but it was found that the most material improvement was the compendious size of the new instruments; for, in increasing the dimensions, the optician was stopped by the impossibility of obtaining lenses of flint-glass of very large dimensions. And this branch of art remained long stationary; but, after a time, its epoch of advance again arrived. In the present century, Fraunhofer, at Munich, with the help of Guinand and the pecuniary support of Utzschneider, succeeded in forming lenses of flint-glass of a magnitude till then unheard of. Achromatic object-glasses, of a foot in diameter, and twenty feet focal length, are now no longer impossible; although in such attempts the artist cannot reckon on certain success.

[125] Bailly, iii. 118.

[2d Ed.] [Joseph Fraunhofer was born March 6, 1787, at Straubing in Bavaria, the son of a poor glazier. He was in his earlier years employed in his father’s trade, so that he was not able to attend school, and remained ignorant of writing and arithmetic till his fourteenth year. At a later period he was assisted by Utzschneider, and tried rapidly to recover his lost ground. In the year 1806 he entered the establishment of Utzschneider as an optician. In this establishment (transferred from Benedictbeuern to Munich in 1819) he soon came to be the greatest Optician of Germany. His excellent telescopes and microscopes are known throughout Europe. His greatest telescope, that in the Observatory at Dorpat, has an object-glass of 9 inches diameter, and a focal length of 13⅓ feet. His written productions are to be found in the Memoirs of the Bavarian Academy, in Gilbert’s Annalen der Physik, and in Schumacher’s Astronomische Nachrichten. He died the 7th of June, 1826.] [476]

Such telescopes might be expected to add something to our knowledge of the heavens, if they had not been anticipated by reflectors of an equal or greater scale. James Gregory had invented, and Newton had more efficaciously introduced, reflecting telescopes. But these were not used with any peculiar effect, till the elder Herschel made them his especial study. His skill and perseverance in grinding specula, and in contriving the best apparatus for their use, were rewarded by a number of curious and striking discoveries, among which, as we have [already] related, was the discovery of a new planet beyond Saturn. In 1789, Herschel surpassed all his former attempts, by bringing into action a reflecting telescope of forty feet length, with a speculum of four feet in diameter. The first application of this magnificent instrument showed a new satellite (the sixth) of Saturn. He and his son have, with reflectors of twenty feet, made a complete survey of the heavens, so far as they are visible in this country; and the latter is now in a distant region completing this survey, by adding to it the other hemisphere.

In speaking of the improvements of telescopes we ought to notice, that they have been pursued in the eye-glasses as well as in the object-glasses. Instead of the single lens, Huyghens substituted an eye-piece of two lenses, which, though introduced for another purpose, attained the object of destroying color.[126] Ramsden’s eye-piece is one fit to be used with a micrometer, and others of more complex construction have been used for various purposes. ~Additional material in the [3rd edition].~

[126] Coddington’s Optics, ii. 21.

Sect. 2.—Observatories.

Astronomy, which is thus benefited by the erection of large and stable instruments, requires also the establishment of permanent Observatories, supplied with funds for their support, and for that of the observers. Such observatories have existed at all periods of the history of the science; but from the commencement of the period which we are now reviewing, they multiplied to such an extent that we cannot even enumerate them. Yet we must undoubtedly look upon such establishments, and the labors of which they have been the scene, as important and essential parts of the history of the progress of astronomy. Some of the most distinguished of the observatories of modern times we may mention. The first of these were that of Tycho Brahe [477] at Uraniburg, and that of the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel, at Cassel, where Rothman and Byrgius observed. But by far the most important observations, at least since those of Tycho, which were the basis of the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, have been made at Paris and Greenwich. The Observatory of Paris was built in 1667. It was there that the first Cassini made many of his discoveries; three of his descendants have since labored in the same place, and two others of his family, the Maraldis;[127] besides many other eminent astronomers, as Picard, La Hire, Lefêvre, Fouchy, Legentil, Chappe, Méchain, Bouvard. Greenwich Observatory was built a few years later (1675); and ever since its erection, the observations there made have been the foundation of the greatest improvements which astronomy, for the time, received. Flamsteed, Halley, Bradley, Bliss, Maskelyne, Pond, have occupied the place in succession: on the retirement of the last-named astronomer in 1835, Professor Airy was removed thither from the Cambridge Observatory. In every state, and in almost every principality in Europe, Observatories have been established; but these have often fallen speedily into inaction, or have contributed little to the progress of astronomy, because their observations have not been published. From the same causes, the numerous private observatories which exist throughout Europe have added little to our knowledge, except where the attention of the astronomer has been directed to some definite points; as, for instance, the magnificent labors of the Herschels, or the skilful observations made by Mr. Pond with the Westbury circle, which first pointed out the error of graduation of the Greenwich quadrants. The Observations, now regularly published,[128] are those of Greenwich, begun by Maskelyne, and continued quarterly by Mr. Pond; those of Königsberg, published by Bessel since 1814; of Vienna, by Littrow since 1820; of Speier, by Schwerd since 1826; those of Cambridge, commenced by Airy in 1828; of Armagh, by Robinson in 1829. Besides these, a number of useful observations have been published in journals and occasional forms; as, for instance, those of Zach, made by Seeberg, near Gotha, since 1788; and others have been employed in forming catalogues, of which we shall speak shortly.

[127] Mont. iv. 346.

[128] Airy, Rep. p. 128.

[2d Ed.] [I have left the statement of published Observations in the text as it stood originally. I believe that at present (1847) the twelve places contained in the following list publish their Observations quite regularly, or nearly so;—Greenwich, Oxford, Cambridge, Vienna, [478] Berlin, Dorpat, Munich, Geneva, Paris, Königsberg, Madras, the Cape of Good Hope.

Littrow, in his translation, adds to the publications noticed in the text as containing astronomical Observations, Zach’s Monatliche Correspondenz, Lindenau and Bohnenberger’s Zeitschrift für Astronomie, Bode’s Astronomisches Jahrbuch, Schumacher’s Astronomische Nachrichten.]

Nor has the establishment of observatories been confined to Europe. In 1786, M. de Beauchamp, at the expense of Louis the Sixteenth, erected an observatory at Bagdad, “built to restore the Chaldean and Arabian observations,” as the inscription stated; but, probably, the restoration once effected, the main intention had been fulfilled, and little perseverance in observing was thought necessary. In 1828, the British government completed the building of an observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, which Lacaille had already made an astronomical station by his observations there at an earlier period (1750); and an observatory formed in New South Wales by Sir T. M. Brisbane in 1822, and presented by him to the government, is also in activity. The East India Company has founded observatories at Madras, Bombay, and St. Helena; and observations made at the former of these places, and at St. Helena, have been published.

The bearing of the work done at such observatories upon the past progress of astronomy, has already been seen in the preceding narrative. Their bearing upon the present condition of the science will be the subject of a few remarks [hereafter].

Sect. 3.—Scientific Societies.

The influence of Scientific Societies, or Academical Bodies, has also been very powerful in the subject before us. In all branches of knowledge, the use of such associations of studious and inquiring men is great; the clearness and coherence of a speculator’s ideas, and their agreement with facts (the two main conditions of scientific truth), are severally but beneficially tested by collision with other minds. In astronomy, moreover, the vast extent of the subject makes requisite the division of labor and the support of sympathy. The Royal Societies of London and of Paris were founded nearly at the same time as the metropolitan Observatories of the two countries. We have seen what constellations of philosophers, and what activity of research, existed at those periods; these philosophers appear in the lists, their discoveries [479] in the publications, of the above-mentioned eminent Societies. As the progress of physical science, and principally of astronomy, attracted more and more admiration, Academies were created in other countries. That of Berlin was founded by Leibnitz in 1710; that of St Petersburg was established by Peter the Great in 1725; and both these have produced highly valuable Memoirs. In more modern times these associations have multiplied almost beyond the power of estimation. They have been formed according to divisions, both of locality and of subject, conformable to the present extent of science, and the vast population of its cultivators. It would be useless to attempt to give a view either of their number or of the enormous mass of scientific literature which their Transactions present. But we may notice, as especially connected with our present subject, the Astronomical Society of London, founded in 1820, which gave a strong impulse to the pursuit of the science in England.

Sect. 4.—Patrons of Astronomy.

The advantages which letters and philosophy derive from the patronage of the great have sometimes been questioned; that love of knowledge, it has been thought, cannot be genuine which requires such stimulation, nor those speculations free and true which are thus forced into being. In the sciences of observation and calculation, however, in which disputed questions can be experimentally decided, and in which opinions are not disturbed by men’s practical principles and interests, there is nothing necessarily operating to poison or neutralize the resources which wealth and power supply to the investigation of truth.

Astronomy has, in all ages, flourished under the favor of the rich and powerful; in the period of which we speak, this was eminently the case. Louis the Fourteenth gave to the astronomy of France a distinction which, without him, it could not have attained. No step perhaps tended more to this than his bringing the celebrated Dominic Cassini to Paris. This Italian astronomer (for he was born at Permaldo, in the county of Nice, and was professor at Bologna), was already in possession of a brilliant reputation, when the French ambassador, in the name of his sovereign, applied to Pope Clement the Ninth, and to the senate of Bologna, that he should be allowed to remove to Paris. The request was granted only so far as an absence of six years; but at the end of that time, the benefits and honors which [480] the king had conferred upon him, fixed him in France. The impulse which his arrival (in 1669) and his residence gave to astronomy, showed the wisdom of the measure. In the same spirit, the French government drew to Paris Römer from Denmark, Huyghens from Holland, and gave a pension to Hevelius, and a large sum when his observatory at Dantzic had been destroyed by fire in 1679.

When the sovereigns of Prussia and Russia were exerting themselves to encourage the sciences in their countries, they followed the same course which had been so successful in France. Thus, as we have [said], the Czar Peter took Delisle to Petersburg in 1725; the celebrated Frederick the Great drew to Berlin, Voltaire and Maupertuis, Euler and Lagrange; and the Empress Catharine obtained in the same way Euler, two of the Bernoulli’s, and other mathematicians. In none of these instances, however, did it happen that “the generous plant did still its stock renew,” as we have seen was the case at Paris, with the Cassinis, and their kinsmen the Maraldis.

[2d Ed.] [I may notice among instances of the patronage of Astronomy, the reward at present offered by the King of Denmark for the discovery of a Comet.]

It is not necessary to mention here the more recent cases in which sovereigns or statesmen have attempted to patronize individual astronomers.

Sect. 5.—Astronomical Expeditions.

Besides the pensions thus bestowed upon resident mathematicians and astronomers, the governments of Europe have wisely and usefully employed considerable sums upon expeditions and travels undertaken by men of science for some appropriate object. Thus Picard, in 1671, was sent to Uraniburg, the scene of Tycho’s observations, to determine its latitude and its longitude. He found that “the City of the Skies” had utterly disappeared from the earth; and even its foundations were retraced with difficulty. With the same object, that of accurately connecting the labors of the places which had been at different periods the metropolis of astronomy, Chazelles was sent, in 1693, to Alexandria. We have already mentioned Richer’s astronomical expedition to Cayenne in 1672. Varin and Deshayes[129] were sent a few years later into the same regions for similar purposes. Halley’s expedition to St. [481] Helena in 1677, with the view of observing the southern stars, was at his own expense; but at a later period (in 1698), he was appointed to the command of a small vessel by King William the Third, in order that he might make his magnetical observations in all parts of the world. Lacaille was maintained by the French government four years at the Cape of Good Hope (1750–4), for the purpose of observing the stars of the southern hemisphere. The two transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769, occasioned expeditions to be sent to Kamtschatka and Tobolsk by the Russians; to the Isle of France, and to Coromandel, by the French;[130] to the isles of St. Helena and Otaheite by the English; to Lapland and to Drontheim, by the Swedes and Danes. I shall not here refer to the measures of degrees executed by various nations, still less the innumerable surveys by land and sea; but I may just notice the successive English expeditions of Captains Basil Hall, Sabine, and Foster, for the purpose of determining the length of the seconds’ pendulum in different latitudes; and the voyages of M. Biot and others, sent by the French government for the same purpose. Much has been done in this way, but not more than the progress of astronomy absolutely required; and only a small portion of that which the completion of the subject calls for.

[129] Bailly, ii. 374.

[130] Bailly, iii. 107.

Sect. 6.—Present State of Astronomy.

Astronomy, in its present condition, is not only much the most advanced of the sciences, but is also in far more favorable circumstances than any other science for making any future advance, as soon as this is possible. The general methods and conditions by which such an advantage is to be obtained for the various sciences, we shall endeavor hereafter to throw some light upon; but in the mean time, we may notice here some of the circumstances in which this peculiar felicity of the present state of astronomy may be traced.

The science is cultivated by a number of votaries, with an assiduity and labor, and with an expenditure of private and public resources, to which no other subject approaches; and the mode of its cultivation in all public and most private observatories, has this character—that it forms, at the same time, a constant process of verification of existing discoveries, and a strict search for any new discoverable laws. The observations made are immediately referred to the best tables, and [482] corrected by the best formulæ which are known; and if the result of such a reduction leaves any thing unaccounted for, the astronomer is forthwith curious and anxious to trace this deviation from the expected numbers to its rule and its origin; and till the first, at least, of these things is performed, he is dissatisfied and unquiet. The reference of observations to the state of the heavens as known by previous researches, implies a great amount of calculation. The exact places of the stars at some standard period are recorded in Catalogues; their movements, according to the laws hitherto detected, are arranged in Tables; and if these tables are applied to predict the numbers which observation on each day ought to give, they form Ephemerides. Thus the catalogues of fixed stars of Flamsteed, of Piazzi, of Maskelyne, of the Astronomical Society, are the basis of all observation. To these are applied the Corrections for Refraction of Bradley or Bessel, and those for Aberration, for Nutation, for Precession, of the best modern astronomers. The observations so corrected enable the observer to satisfy himself of the delicacy and fidelity of his measures of time and space; his Clocks and his Arcs. But this being done, different stars so observed can be compared with each other, and the astronomer can then endeavor further to correct his fundamental Elements;—his Catalogue, or his Tables of Corrections. In these Tables, though previous discovery has ascertained the law, yet the exact quantity, the constant or coefficient of the formula, can be exactly fixed only by numerous observations and comparisons. This is a labor which is still going on, and in which there are differences of opinion on almost every point; but the amount of these differences is the strongest evidence of the certainty and exactness of those doctrines in which all agree. Thus Lindenau makes the coefficient of Nutation rather less than nine seconds, which other astronomers give as about nine seconds and three-tenths. The Tables of Refraction are still the subject of much discussion, and of many attempts at improvement. And after or amid these discussions, arise questions whether there be not other corrections of which the law has not yet been assigned. The most remarkable example of such questions is the controversy concerning the existence of an Annual Parallax of the fixed stars, which Brinkley asserted, and which Pond denied. Such a dispute between two of the best modern observers, only proves that the quantity in question, if it really exist, is of the same order as the hitherto unsurmounted errors of instruments and corrections.

[2d Ed.] [The belief in an appreciable parallax of some of the fixed [483] stars appears to gain ground among astronomers. The parallax of 61 Cygni, as determined by Bessel, is 0″·34; about one-third of a second, or ¹⁄₁₀₀₀₀ of a degree. That of α Centauri, as determined by Maclear, is 0″·9, or ¹⁄₄₀₀₀ of a degree.]

But besides the fixed stars and their corrections, the astronomer has the motions of the planets for his field of action. The established theories have given us tables of these, from which their daily places are calculated and given in our Ephemerides, as the Berliner Jahrbuch of Encke, or the Nautical Almanac, published by the government of this country, the Connaissance des Tems which appears at Paris, or the Effemeridi di Milano. The comparison of the observed with the tabular place, gives us the means of correcting the coefficients of the tables; and thus of obtaining greater exactness in the constants of the solar system. But these constants depend upon the mass and form of the bodies of which the system is composed; and in this province, as well as in sidereal astronomy, different determinations, obtained by different paths, may be compared; and doubts may be raised and may be solved. In this way, the perturbations produced by Jupiter on different planets gave rise to a doubt whether his attraction be really proportional to his mass, as the law of universal gravitation asserts. The doubt has been solved by Nicolai and Encke in Germany, and by Airy in England. The mass of Jupiter, as shown by the perturbations of Juno, of Vesta, and of Encke’s Comet, and by the motion of his outermost Satellite, is found to agree, though different from the mass previously received on the authority of Laplace. Thus also Burckhardt, Littrow, and Airy, have corrected the elements of the Solar Tables. In other cases, the astronomer finds that no change of the coefficients will bring the Tables and the observations to a coincidence;—that a new term in the formula is wanting. He obtains, as far as he can, the law of this unknown term; if possible, he traces it to some known or probable cause. Thus Mr. Airy, in his examination of the Solar Tables, not only found that a diminution of the received mass of Mars was necessary, but perceived discordances which led him to suspect the existence of a new inequality. Such an inequality was at length found to result theoretically from the attraction of Venus. Encke, in his examination of his comet, found a diminution of the periodic time in the successive revolutions; from which he inferred the existence of a resisting medium. Uranus still deviates from his tabular place, and the cause remains yet to be discovered. (But see the [Additions] to this volume.) [484]

Thus it is impossible that an assertion, false to any amount which the existing state of observation can easily detect, should have any abiding prevalence in astronomy. Such errors may long keep their ground in any science which is contained mainly in didactic works, and studied in the closet, but not acted upon elsewhere;—which is reasoned upon much, but brought to the test of experiment rarely or never. Here, on the contrary, an error, if it arise, makes its way into the Tables, into the Ephemeris, into the observer’s nightly List, or his sheet of Reductions; the evidence of sense flies in its face in a thousand observatories; the discrepancy is traced to its source, and soon disappears forever.

In this favored branch of knowledge, the most recondite and delicate discoveries can no more suffer doubt or contradiction, than the most palpable facts of sense which the face of nature offers to our notice. The last great discovery in astronomy—the motion of the stars arising from Aberration—is as obvious to the vast population of astronomical observers in all parts of the world, as the motion of the stars about the pole is to the casual night wanderer. And this immunity from the danger of any large error in the received doctrines, is a firm platform on which the astronomer can stand and exert himself to reach perpetually further and further into the region of the unknown.

The same scrupulous care and diligence in recording all that has hitherto been ascertained, has been extended to those departments of astronomy in which we have as yet no general principles which serve to bind together our acquired treasures. These records may be considered as constituting a Descriptive Astronomy; such are, for instance, Catalogues of Stars, and Maps of the Heavens, Maps of the Moon, representations of the appearance of the Sun and Planets as seen through powerful telescopes, pictures of Nebulæ, of Comets, and the like. Thus, besides the Catalogue of Fundamental Stars which may be considered as standard points of reference for all observations of the Sun, Moon, and Planets, there exist many large catalogues of smaller stars. Flamsteed’s Historia Celestis, which much surpassed any previous catalogue, contained above 3000 stars. But in 1801, the French Histoire Céleste appeared, comprising observations of 50,000 stars. Catalogues or charts of other special portions of the sky have been published more recently; and in 1825, the Berlin Academy proposed to the astronomers of Europe to carry on this work by portioning out the heavens among them.

[2d Ed.] [Before Flamsteed, the best Catalogue of the Stars was [485] Tycho Brahe’s, containing the places of about 1000 stars, determined very roughly with the naked eye. On the occasion of a project of finding the longitude, which was offered to Charles II., in 1674, Flamsteed represented that the method was quite useless, in consequence, among other things, of the inaccuracy of Tycho’s places of the stars. Flamsteed’s letters being shown King Charles, he was startled at the assertion of the fixed stars’ places being false in the Catalogue, and said, with some vehemence, “He must have them anew observed, examined, and corrected for the use of his seamen.” This was the immediate occasion of building Greenwich Observatory, and placing Flamsteed there as an observer. Flamsteed’s Historia Celestis contained above 3000 stars, observed with telescopic sights. It has recently been republished with important improvements by Mr. Baily. See Baily’s Flamsteed, p. 38.

The French Histoire Céleste was published in 1801 by Lalande, containing 50,000 stars, simply as observed by himself and other French astronomers. The reduction of the observations contained in this Catalogue to the mean places at the beginning of the year 1800 may be effected by means of Tables published by Schumacher for that purpose in 1825.

In 1807, Piazzi’s Catalogue of 6748 stars, founded on Maskelyne’s Catalogue of 1700, was published; afterwards extended to 7646 stars in 1814. This is considered as the greatest work undertaken by any modern astronomer; the observations being well made, reduced, and compared with those of former astronomers. Piazzi’s Catalogue is the standard and accurate Catalogue, as the Histoire Céleste is the standard approximate Catalogue for small stars. But the new planets were discovered mostly by a comparison of the heavens with Bode’s (Berlin) Catalogue.

I may mention other Catalogues of Stars which have recently been published. Pond’s Catalogue contains 1112 Northern stars; Johnson’s, 606; Wrottesley’s, 1318 (in Right Ascension only); Airy’s First Cambridge Catalogue, 726; his Greenwich Catalogue, 1439. Pearson’s has 520 zodiacal stars; Groombridge’s, 4243 circumpolar stars as far as 50 degrees of North Polar distance; Santini’s, a zone 18 degrees North of the equator. Besides these, Mr. Taylor has published, by order of the Madras government, a Catalogue of 11,000 stars observed by him at Madras; and Rumker, who observed in the Observatory established by Sir Thomas Brisbane at Paramatta (in Australia), has commenced a Catalogue which is to contain 12,000. Mr. Baily [486] published two Standard Catalogues; that of the Royal Astronomical Society, containing 2881 stars; and that of the British Association, containing 8377 stars. I omit other Catalogues, as those of Argelander, &c., and Catalogues of Southern Stars.

Of the Berlin Maps, fourteen hours in Right Ascension have been published; and their value may be judged of by this circumstance, that it was in a great measure by comparing the heavens with these Maps that the new planet Astræa was discovered. The Zone observations made at Königsberg, by the late illustrious astronomer Bessel, deserve to be mentioned, as embracing a vast number of stars.

The common mode of designating the Stars is founded upon the ancient constellations as given by Ptolemy; to which Bayer, of Augsburg, in his Uranometria, added the artifice of designating the brightest stars in each constellation by the Greek letters, α, β, γ, &c., applied in order of brightness, and when these were exhausted, the Latin letters. Flamsteed used numbers. As the number of observed stars increased, various methods were employed for designating them; and the confusion which has been thus introduced, both with regard to the boundaries of the constellations and the nomenclature of the stars in each, has been much complained of lately. Some attempts have been made to remedy this variety and disorder. Mr. Argelander has recently recorded stars, according to their magnitudes as seen by the naked eye, in a Neue Uranometrie.

Among representations of the Moon I may mention Hevelius’s Selenographia, a work of former times, and Beer and Madler’s Map of the Moon, recently published.]

I have [already] said something of the observations of the two Herschels on Double Stars, which have led to a knowledge of the law of the revolution of such systems. But besides these, the same illustrious astronomers have accumulated enormous treasures of observations of Nebulæ; the materials, it may be, hereafter, of some vast new generalization with respect to the history of the system of the universe.

[2d Ed.] [A few measures of Double Stars are to be found in previous astronomical records. But the epoch of the creation of this part of the science of astronomy must be placed at the beginning of the present century, when Sir William Herschel (in 1802) published in the Phil. Trans. a Catalogue of 500 new Nebulæ of various classes, and in the Phil. Trans. 1803, a paper “On the changes in the relative situation of the Double Stars in 25 years.” In succeeding papers he pursued the subject. In one in 1814 he noticed the breaking up of the [487] Milky Way in different places, apparently from some principle of Attraction; and in this, and in one in 1817, he published those remarkable views on the distribution of the stars in our own cluster as forming a large stratum, and on the connection of stars and nebulæ (the stars appearing sometimes to be accompanied by nebulæ, sometimes to have absorbed a part of the nebula, and sometimes to have been formed from nebulæ), which have been accepted and propounded by others as the Nebular Theory. Sir William Herschel’s last paper was a Catalogue of 145 new Double Stars communicated to the Astronomical Society in 1822. In 1827 M. Struve, of Dorpat (in Russia), published his Catalogus Novus, containing the places of 3112 double stars. While this was going on, Sir John Herschel and Sir James South published (in the Phil. Trans. 1824) accurate measures of 380 Double and Triple Stars, to which Sir J. South afterwards added 458. Mr. Dunlop published measures of 253 Southern Double Stars. Other Observations have been published by Capt. Smyth, Mr. Dawes, &c. The great work of Struve, Mensuræ Micrometricæ, &c., contains 3134 such objects, including most of Sir W. Herschel’s Double Stars. Sir J. Herschel in 1826, 7, and 8 presented to the Astronomical Society about 1000 measures of Double Stars; and in 1830, good measures of 1236, made with his 20-feet reflector. His paper in vol. v. of the Ast. Soc. Mem., besides measures of 364 such stars, exhibits all the most striking results, as to the motion of Double Stars, which have yet been obtained. In 1835 he carried his 20-feet reflector to the Cape of Good Hope for the purpose of completing the survey of Double Stars and Nebulæ in the southern hemisphere with the same instruments which had explored the northern skies. He returned from the Cape in 1838, and is now (1846) about to give the world the results of his labors. Besides the stars just mentioned, his work will contain from 1500 to 2000 additional double stars; making a gross number of above 8000; in which of course are included a number of objects of no great scientific interest, but in which also are contained the materials of the most important discoveries which remain to be made by astronomers. The publication of Sir John Herschel’s great work upon Double Stars and Nebulæ is looked for with eager interest by astronomers.

Of the observations of Nebulæ we may say what has just been said of the observations of Double Stars;—that they probably contain the materials of important future discoveries. It is impossible not to regard these phenomena with reference to the Nebular Hypothesis, which has been propounded by Laplace, and much more strongly [488] insisted upon by other persons;—namely, the hypothesis that systems of revolving planets, of which the Solar System is an example, arise from the gradual contraction and separation of vast masses of nebulous matter. Yet it does not appear that any changes have been observed in nebulæ which tend to confirm this hypothesis; and the most powerful telescope in the world, recently erected by the Earl of Rosse, has given results which militate against the hypothesis; inasmuch as it has shown that what appeared a diffused nebulous mass is, by a greater power of vision, resolved, in all cases yet examined, into separate stars.

When astronomical phenomena are viewed with reference to the Nebular Hypothesis, they do not belong so properly to Astronomy, in the view here taken of it, as to Cosmogony. If such speculations should acquire any scientific value, we shall have to arrange them among those which I have called Palætiological Sciences; namely, those Sciences which contemplate the universe, the earth, and its inhabitants, with reference to their historical changes and the causes of those changes.]