XXXIl Mr. Pickering’s Eulogy on 
In the very commencement, you cannot fail to be struck with 
the broad and general views, which the author has taken of his 
vast subject, as a whole; and the regular and beautiful order 
in which he gradually proceeds to every necessary detail, till the 
entire subject is exhausted; thus justifying the remark made by 
an able writer, before quoted; who says, “Such is the work of 
La Place, affording an example, which is yet solitary in the history 
of human knowledge, of a theory entirely complete; one that has 
not only accounted for all the phenomena that were known, but 
that has discovered many before unknown, which observation has 
since recognised. In this theory, not only the elliptic motion of 
the planets, relatively to the sun, but the irregularities produced 
by their mutual action, whether of the primary on the primary, of 
the primary on the secondary, or of the secondary on one another, 
are all deduced from the principle of gravitation; that mysterious 
power, which unites the most distant regions of space, and the 
most remote periods of duration. To this, we must add the great 
truths, — brought in view and fully demonstrated, by tracing the 
action of the same power through all its mazes, — that all the 
inequalities in our system are periodical; that, by a fixed appoint- 
ment in nature, they are each destined to revolve in the same 
order, and between the same limits; that the mean distances of 
the planets from the sun, and the time of their revolutions round 
that body, are susceptible of no change whatsoever; that our sys- 
tem is thus secured against natural decay; order and regularity 
preserved in the midst of so many disturbing causes; and anarchy 
and misrule eternally proscribed.” * 
The first principal division of the Mécanique Céleste treats of 
the “Laws of Equilibrium and Motion”; and, under that general 
* Professor Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, Vol. II. p. 277. 
