Dr. Bowditch, President of the American Academy. xxxix 
which, is the figure of a fluid mass in equilibrium and having a 
rotatory motion, as the ocean of our Earth; and, finally, after con- 
sidering the attraction between masses of matter, the author pro- 
ceeds to that which takes place between their particles. 
In this manner does the author bring into one grand and magnifi- 
cent review, the wonderful phenomena of all matter, the entire mass 
of the material world, through the various portions into which it 
may be divided, till he arrives at those inconceivably minute parti- 
cles, whose law of attraction cannot be certainly determined by the 
phenomena, because they elude the power of human observation. 
Such is the outline of this extraordinary work ; a work, which, 
an able writer observes, “does honor, not to the author only, but 
to the human race; and marks, undoubtedly, the highest point 
to which man has yet ascended, in the scale of intellectual attain- 
ment.” * 
The Translation and Commentary of Dr. Bowditch extend to 
the first four volumes of the original work; which, in fact, contain 
the whole of the author’s plan and views of the Mechanism of the 
Heavens. La Place had, however, shortly before his death, added 
a fifth volume, which it is only necessary to mention very briefly at 
this time. It was published at an interval of twenty years after 
the former volumes, and contains historical notices of the labors of 
other geometers on the same subjects, together with such further 
researches, as the author himself had subsequently made. This 
volume has not been translated by Dr. Bowditch; but this was the 
less necessary, as he has incorporated into the notes of his four vol- 
umes, and under the proper heads, all the important scientific matter 
contained in this additional volume, except upon the subject of the 
Earth’s temperature and the velocity of sound; so that the Translation 
* Professor Playfair, in the Edinburgh Review, Vol. XI. p. 278. 
