Historical Eulogy of the Marquis De Laplace. 7 
Be the physical cause of the formation of the planets what it may, 
it has fixed upon all these bodies a motion of projection in the same di- 
rection around an immense globe. By this the solar system is become 
stable. The same effect is produced in the system of satellites and of 
rings. The order there is maintained by the power of the central mass. 
This power is not then, as Newton himself, and as Kuler, too, suspect- 
ed, an adventitious force which, one day, must repair or prevent the 
trouble which time had caused. It is the law itself of gravitation 
that governs all, suffices for all, and maintains variety and order. 
Having emanated once from supreme wisdom, it presides from the 
beginning of time, and renders all disorder impossible. Newton and 
Euler still knew not all the perfections of the universe. 
In general, every time that there has arisen any doubt on the ex- 
actness of the Newtonian law, and that, to explain the apparent irreg- 
ularities, we have proposed the addition of a strange cause, it has 
always happened, after a thorough examination, that the original law 
has been verified. It now explains all the known phenomena. The 
more precise the observations, the more do they conform to the the- 
ory. Laplace is, of all geometers, the one who has investigated 
these questions the most; he has, so to speak, ended them. 
We cannot affirm that it was granted to him to create a science 
entirely new, as Archimedes and Galileo have done ; to give to math- 
ematical doctrines original principles, en Dancarien: Newton, and 
Leibnitz ; or like Newton, to transport the first into the skies, and to 
extend to all the universe the terrestrial dynamics of Galileo; but 
Lariace was born to bring every thing to perfection, to innasignn 
every thing, to extend all the limits, and to resolve what had been 
thought incapable of solution. He would have completed the sci- 
ence of the heavens, if this science could be completed. 
We find again the same charscher:3 in his copoarches upon the anal- 
ysis of probabilities, a science entirely , the object 
of which, often misconceived, has given rise to the most false inter- 
pretations ; but the application of which will one one day embrace 
the whole field of human knowledge, a happy supplement to the im- 
perfection of our nature. 
This art sprung from a single feature of the clear and fruitful pas 
of Pascal ; it has been cultivated from its origin, by Fermat and Hay- 
gens. A eliieiaphios’ geometer, James Bernouilli, was its 
ee A aa! asi — of Stirling, the researches of 
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