90 Generating Economic Cycles 



disdainful attitude of Laplace: ''Venus surpasse en 

 clarte les autres planetes et les etoiles ; elle est quelque- 

 fois si brillante, qu'on la voit en plein jour, a la vue 

 simple. Ce phenomene, qui revient assez souvent, ne 

 manque jamais d'exciter une vive surprise; et le vul- 

 gaire, dans sa credule ignorance, le suppose toujours 

 lie aux evenements contemporains les plus remar- 

 quables." ^ Now with regard to this remark, the sub- 

 stance of which is repeated by others in pamphlets and 

 treatises, these comments should be made : 



(1) Laplace's scorn was directed towards the prog- 

 nosticators who encouraged the belief that particular, 

 isolated events were predictable from the aspect of 

 Venus. 



(2) Until many years after the death of Laplace, 

 economic and meteorological observations had not been 

 carried sufficiently far to admit of the isolation of long- 

 time cycles showing mean results which could be asso- 

 ciated with cosmical variations. 



(3) Many physicists and astronomers of unques- 

 tioned sanity and proven ability have attempted to 

 discover the effect of Venus upon the position and fre- 

 quency of sunspots. If that is not a visionary inquiry 

 when Venus is nearly three times further from the Sun 

 than it is from the Earth, the consideration of the pos- 

 sible effects of that planet upon the weather of the 

 Earth should not be regarded as a preposterous under- 

 taking. 



Returning now to the question of the periodicity in 

 the motion of Venus with respect to the Earth let us 

 first recall that the relative distances of the Earth and 



1 Laplace, Exposilion du systems du monde, Livre premier, chap. v. 



