308 LAPLACE. 
by him in this investigation, and still he was not weary 
of it! What, in reality, are twenty-two years of labour 
to him who is about to become the legislator of worlds ; 
who shall inscribe his name in ineffaceable characters 
upon the frontispiece of an immortal code ; who shall be 
able to exclaim in dithyrambic lapguage, and without 
incurring the reproach of any one, “The die is cast; I 
have written my book; it will be read either in the 
present age or by posterity, it matters not which ; it may 
well await a reader, since God has waited six thousand 
years for an interpreter of his works?” * 
To investigate a physical cause capable of making the 
planets revolve in closed curves; to place the principle 
of the stability of the universe in mechanical forces and 
not in solid supports such as the spheres of crystal which 
our ancestors had dreamed of; to extend to the revolu- 
tions of the heavenly bodies the general principles of 
the mechanics of terrestrial bodies,—such were the ques- 
tions which remained to be solved after Kepler had 
announced his discoveries to the world. 
Very distinct traces of these great problems are per- 
ceived here and there among the ancients as well as the 
* These celebrated laws, known in astronomy as the laws of Kep- 
ler, are three in number. The first law is, that the planets describe 
ellipses around the sun in their common focus; the second, that a line 
joining the planet and the sun sweeps over equal areas in equal times; 
the third, that the squares of the periodic times of the planets are 
proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from thesun. The 
first two laws were discovered by Kepler in the course of a laborious 
examination of the theory of the planet Mars; a full account of this 
inquiry is contained in his famous work De Stella Martis, published 
in 1609. The discovery of the third law was not effected until, sev- 
eral years afterwards, Kepler announced it to the world in his treatise 
on Harmonics (1628). The passage quoted below is extracted from 
that work.— Translator. 
