210 HISTORY OF PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY. 



the moment of the creation. You will observe also 

 that the sun, which in France has nothing to do 

 with the business, here comes in for a quarter of it. 

 Among you Cartesians, all is done by an impulsion 

 which one does not well understand; with the 

 Newtonians, it is done by an attraction of which 

 we know the cause no better. At Paris you fancy 

 the earth shaped like a melon, at London it is flat- 

 tened on the two sides." 



It was Voltaire himself, as we have said, who 

 was mainly instrumental in giving the Newtonian 

 doctrines currency in France. He was at first 

 refused permission to print his Elements of the 

 Newtonian Philosophy, by the chancellor, D'Agues- 

 seaux, who was a Cartesian; but after the ap- 

 pearance of this work in 1738, and of other writ- 

 ings by him on the same subject, the Cartesian 

 edifice, already without real support or consistency, 

 crumbled to pieces and disappeared. The first 

 Memoir in the Transactions of the French Academy 

 in which the doctrine of central force is applied 

 to the solar system, is one by the Chevalier de 

 Louville in 1720, On the Construction and Theory 

 of Tables of the Sun. In this, however, the mode 

 of explaining the motions of the planets by means 

 of an original impulse and an attractive force is 

 attributed to Kepler, not to Newton. The first 

 Memoir which refers to the universal gravitation 

 of matter is by Maupertuis, in 1736. But Newton 

 was not unknown or despised in France till this 



