THE SUN'S DESTINATION. 191 



THE SUN'S DESTINATION. 



By Professor HAROLD JACOBY, 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. 



THREE generations of men have come and gone since the Marquis 

 de Laplace stood before the Academy of France and gave his 

 demonstration of the permanent stability of our solar system. There 

 was one significant fault in Newton's superbly simple conception of an 

 eternal law governing the world in which we live. The labors of 

 mathematicians following him had shown that the planets must trace 

 out paths in space whose form could be determined in advance with 

 unerring certaint}' by the aid of Newton's law of gravitation. But 

 they proved just as conclusively that these planetary orbits, as they 

 are called, could not maintain indefinitely the same shapes or positions. 

 Slow indeed might be the changes they were destined to undergo; 

 slow, but sure, with that sureness belonging to celestial science alone. 

 And so men asked: Has this magnificent solar system been built 

 upon a scale so grand, been put in operation subject to a law sublime 

 in its very simplicity, only to change and change until at length it shall 

 lose every semblance of its former self, and end perhaps in chaos or 

 extinction? 



Laplace was able to answer confidently: No. Nor was his answer 

 couched in the enthusiastic language of unbalanced theorists who 

 work by the aid of imagination alone. Based upon the irrefragable 

 logic of correct mathematical reasoning, and clad in the sober garb 

 of mathematical formulae, his results carried conviction to men of 

 science the world over. So was it demonstrated that changes in our 

 solar system are surely at work, and shall continue for nearly countless 

 ages; yet just as surely will they be reversed at last, and the system will 

 tend to return again to its original form and condition. The objection 

 that the Newtonian law meant ultimate dissolution of the world was 

 thus destroyed by Laplace. From that day forward, the law of grav- 

 itation has been accepted as holding sway over all phenomena visible 

 within our planetary world. 



The intricacies of our own solar system being thus illumined, the 

 restless activity of the human intellect was stimulated to search beyond 

 for new problems and new mysteries. Even more fascinating than 

 the movements of our sun and planets are all those questions that relate 

 to the clustered stellar congeries hanging suspended within the deep 

 blue vault of night. Does the same law of gravitation cast its magic 



