THE LAW OF GRAVITATION. All 



the first time announced. Some twelve years later, in his work, 

 entitled 'Harmonies/ he announced the third law of planetary motion, 

 fully establishing his right to the title, by which he has since been dis- 

 tinguished 'The Legislator of the Heavens.' 



These laws of Kepler are: First, that the orbits of the planets are 

 elliptical, the sun being at one of the foci; second, that the radius 

 vector, that is, a line drawn from a planet to the sun, passes over equal 

 spaces in equal times; third, that the squares of the times of revolution 

 of the different planets, are to each other as the cubes of the mean 

 distances from the sun. 



Together with these laws of planetary motion, two of the three 

 axioms of the science of mechanics, known as the Laws of Motion, 

 were about this time discovered, or rather, were now for the first time 

 distinctly apprehended and enunciated. The first of these was given 

 by Kepler — the law of inertia, namely, that a body will persevere in 

 the state in which it is, whether of rest or motion, until it is acted on 

 by some force; or more precisely, a body at rest will continue at rest 

 until acted on by some force, and when acted on by any single force, 

 if free to move, its motion will be rectilinear, uniform and continuous 

 until the body is acted on by some other force. The second law of 

 motion was announced by Galileo, and is known as the law of the 

 coexistence of motions, or independence of forces. It may be expressed 

 as follows: If a body be acted on by several forces simultaneously, it 

 will obey the impulse of each force, just as it would if the others were 

 not acting. [The simplest illustration of this law is what is known 

 as the parallelogram of forces. If the direction and intensity of two 

 forces acting simultaneously on a body be represented by the sides of a 

 parallelogram, the body will describe the diagonal of the parallelogram ; 

 that is, at the end of a unit of time the body will be just where it 

 would have been if the forces had, each for a unit of time, acted con- 

 secutively.] 



The true system of the universe, the laws of planetary motion and 

 the fundamental principles of mechanics having become known, for 

 the first time in the history of the race any intelligent inquiry as to 

 the physical causes of the motions of the heavenly bodies became pos- 

 sible. With earnestness and assiduity proportioned to the interest and 

 grandeur of the problem, men of science at once applied themselves to 

 its solution, and yet half a century of gradual progress elapsed before 

 the desired result was reached. From the facts which we shall have 

 occasion to mention it will appear how much, or rather how little, 

 foundation there is for the common belief that the idea of the law of 

 gravitation was wholly original with Newton — suggested to him for 

 the first time by observing the fall of an apple, and then suddenly 

 coming forth from his brain like Minerva from the head of Jove, un- 



