Dr. Bowditch, President of the American Academy. xxvii 
of universal gravitation; and finally, to descend again from that 
principle to a complete explanation of all the celestial phenomena, 
even in their most minute details. And this is what the human 
intellect has accomplished in Astronomy,” * that science, which, 
in another part of his work, he justly characterizes as “the most 
sublime of all the natural sciences,” and whose objects cannot fail 
to draw around it a degree of their own splendor and magnificence ; 
while the immense masses of those objects, their boundless dis- 
tances, and the inconceivable velocity, yet steadiness and regularity 
of their movements, while they present the highest exercise to the 
human mind, deeply affect the imagination and impress the beholder 
with some conception of that mighty energy, which sustains them 
in their motions with a permanency to which we can see no 
limit. 
“Tt was reserved for Newton,” says La Place again, “to make 
us acquainted with the general principle of the heavenly motions. 
Nature, while she endowed him with a profound genius, took care 
also to give him to the world at the most favorable moment. 
Descartes had changed the face of the mathematical sciences ; 
Fermat had laid the foundation of the geometry of infinites; 
Wallis, Wren, and Huygens had just discovered the laws of mo- 
tion; the discoveries of Galileo on the fall of heavy bodies, and 
those of Huygens on the doctrine of evolutes and centrifugal 
forces, led to the theory of motions in curves; Kepler had de- 
termined those which the planets describe, and had a glimpse of 
universal gravitation ; and finally, Hook had justly perceived, that 
their motions were the result of an original projectile force com- 
bined with the attraction of the sun. The mechanism of the 
heavens, therefore, seemed only to be waiting for some man of 
* Exposition du Systeme du Monde, p. 1. 
