236 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



111 its purest aspect the task of the natural philosopher to-day 

 is to discover the relationships existing between the different phe- 

 nomena which happen in our universe. He seeks to see in the work- 

 ings of nature simply different illustrations of a few fundamental 

 principles. Newton was the greatest of the pioneers in this method 

 of systematized thought. In his great work, the Principia, charac- 

 terized by Marquis Laplace as preeminent above all productions 

 of the human intellect, he demonstrated the pow'erful simplicity of 

 the fundamentals which control the destinies of the heavens. No 

 longer did the universe appear as a bizarre and formless thing gov- 

 erned by such a heterogeneous system of agencies as to merit well the 

 caustic comment of the sovereign of Castille, when, bewailing the 

 complexities involved in an attempt to explain the motions of the 

 planets, he remarked that " Were the heavens thus constituted, he 

 could have given the Deity good advice." 



No longer need the sun carry spokes, as Kepler thought, to grind 

 the planets around in the heavens. No longer was a guardian angel 

 necessary for each planet to guide its course. No longer w^ere the 

 planets whirled through space by the whirlpools of an ether as a 

 twig is whirled about in the rapids. All that was necessary was the 

 laws of motion of Galileo, operating under the influence of a force 

 emanating from the sun according to the inverse square of the dis- 

 tance therefrom. And this force was no new and mysterious thing, 

 for Newton showed that gravitation, that same old force which had 

 been known for so long — gravitation which causes apples to fall 

 from the tree to the ground — was sufficient to control the moon in 

 its orbit, and such a gravitation with its origin in the sun served the 

 purpose of controlling the planetary motions. Moreover, in this 

 same gravitation did the tides find their origin through an attraction 

 of the moon. In this same gravitation from the sun, combined with 

 the flattened shape of the earth, did that mysterious conical motion 

 of the earth's axis concerned with the precession of the equinoxes 

 find its origin, and in the law^s of Galileo w^as to be found an ex- 

 planation of the actual flattening of the earth's shape as a result of 

 the centrifugal force of its rotation. These and mau}^ other things 

 did Newton demonstrate in the " Principia " and by their means 

 brought astronom}^ from a state of pure charlatanism to the state 

 of order symbolized by Pope's famous words, " Nature and nature's 

 laws lay hid in light, God said : ' Let New^ ton be ' and all was light." 

 Even as our greatest architects strive for beauty couched in a 

 fundamental simplicity of design, so the Grand Architect of the 

 universe revealed himself in Newton's great work as the father of the 

 ])rinciple of dignity of structure through ultimate simplicity. It is a 

 great faith in the possibility of seeing in the operations of nature the 

 working of principles which are ultimately simple which, as each new 



