the individual who
was named Lagrange Tournier, two of the most characteristic French names
which it is possible to imagine, whose maternal grandfather was M. Gros,
whose paternal great-grandfather was a French officer, a native of
Paris, who never wrote except in French, and who was invested in our
country with high honours during a period of nearly thirty years;--ought
to be regarded as a Frenchman although born at Turin.--_Author_.

[26] The problem of three bodies was solved independently about the same
time by Euler, D'Alembert, and Clairaut. The two last-mentioned
geometers communicated their solutions to the Academy of Sciences on the
same day, November 15, 1747. Euler had already in 1746 published tables
of the moon, founded on his solution of the same problem, the details of
which he subsequently published in 1753.--_Translator_.

[27] It must be admitted that M. Arago has here imperfectly represented
Newton's labours on the great problem of the precession of the
equinoxes. The immortal author of the Principia did not merely
_conjecture_ that the conical motion of the earth's axis is due to the
disturbing action of the sun and moon upon the matter accumulated around
the earth's equator: he _demonstrated_ by a very beautiful and
satisfactory process that the movement must necessarily arise from that
cause; and although the means of investigation, in his time, were
inadequate to a rigorous computation of the quantitative effect, still,
his researches on the subject have been always regarded as affording one
of the most striking proofs of sagacity which is to be found in all his
works.--_Translator_.

[28] It would appear that Hooke had conjectured that the figure of the
earth might be spheroidal before Newton or Huyghens turned their
attention to the subject. At a meeting of the Royal Society on the 28th
of February, 1678, a discussion arose respecting the figure of Mercury
which M. Gallet of Avignon had remarked to be oval on the occasion of
the planet's transit across the sun's disk on the 7th of November, 1677.
Hooke was inclined to suppose that the phenomenon was real, and that it
was due to the whirling of the planet on an axis "which made it somewhat
of the shape of a turnip, or of a solid made by an ellipsis turned round
upon its shorter diameter." At the meeting of the Society on the 7th of
March, the subject was again discussed. In reply to the objection
offered to his hypothesis on the ground of the p