ts of the celestial
bodies must be connected together by simple laws, or, to use his own
expressions, by _harmonic_ laws. These laws he undertook to discover. A
thousand fruitless attempts, errors of calculation inseparable from a
colossal undertaking, did not prevent him a single instant from
advancing resolutely towards the goal of which he imagined he had
obtained a glimpse. Twenty-two years were employed by him in this
investigation, and still he was not weary of it! What, in reality, are
twenty-two years of labour to him who is about to become the legislator
of worlds; who shall inscribe his name in ineffaceable characters upon
the frontispiece of an immortal code; who shall be able to exclaim in
dithyrambic language, and without incurring the reproach of any one,
"The die is cast; I have written my book; it will be read either in the
present age or by posterity, it matters not which; it may well await a
reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an interpreter of
his works?"[23]

To investigate a physical cause capable of making the planets revolve in
closed curves; to place the principle of the stability of the universe
in mechanical forces and not in solid supports such as the spheres of
crystal which our ancestors had dreamed of; to extend to the revolutions
of the heavenly bodies the general principles of the mechanics of
terrestrial bodies,--such were the questions which remained to be solved
after Kepler had announced his discoveries to the world.

Very distinct traces of these great problems are perceived here and
there among the ancients as well as the moderns, from Lucretius and
Plutarch down to Kepler, Bouillaud, and Borelli. It is to Newton,
however, that we must award the merit of their solution. This great man,
like several of his predecessors, conceived the celestial bodies to have
a tendency to approach towards each other in virtue of an attractive
force, deduced the mathematical characteristics of this force from the
laws of Kepler, extended it to all the material molecules of the solar
system, and developed his brilliant discovery in a work which, even in
the present day, is regarded as the most eminent production of the human
intellect.

The heart aches when, upon studying the history of the sciences, we
perceive so magnificent an intellectual movement effected without the
cooeperation of France. Practical astronomy increased our inferiority.
The means of investigation were at first i