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In this analysis we have merely glanced at the astronomical discoveries of Clairaut, D'Alembert, and Lagrange. We shall be somewhat less concise in noticing the labours of Laplace.
The answer to this question would introduce comets into the category of ordinary planets or would exclude them for ever. The calculation was difficult: Clairaut discovered the means of effecting it.
The theory of the planetary movements is identified with the name of Laplace; hardly is a passing allusion made to the eminent labours of D'Alembert, of Clairaut, of Euler, of Lagrange. Watt is the sole inventor of the steam-engine. Chaptal has enriched the arts of Chemistry with the totality of the fertile and ingenious processes which constitute their prosperity.
Clairaut, assisted by Lalande, found that Saturn would retard the comet 100 days, Jupiter 518 days, and predicted its return to perihelion on April 13th, 1759. In his communication to the French Academy, he said that a comet travelling into such distant regions might be exposed to the influence of forces totally unknown, and "even of some planet too far removed from the sun to be ever perceived."
There is a prominent bright crater on the W. of it, and another on the N., from which a delicate valley runs towards the W. side of Walter. CLAIRAUT. A very peculiar formation, about 40 miles in diameter, S. of Maurolycus, affording another good example of interference and overlapping.
The lunar and planetary theories, the beautiful theory of Jupiter's satellites, the figure of the earth, and the tides, were mathematically treated by Maclaurin, D'Alembert, Legendre, Clairaut, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Walmsley, Bailly, Lalande, Delambre, Mayer, Hansen, Burchardt, Binet, Damoiseau, Plana, Poisson, Gauss, Bessel, Bouvard, Airy, Ivory, Delaunay, Le Verrier, Adams, and others of later date.
By this employment I should have entered a society of men of letters of the first merit; M. de Mairan, Clairaut, De Guignes and the Abbe Barthelemi, with the first two of whom I had already made an acquaintance, and that of the two others was very desirable.
On the W. there is an irregular inconspicuous enclosure, whose contiguity has apparently modified the shape of the border. CUVIER. A walled-plain, about 50 miles in diameter, on the S.E. of Clairaut. The border on the E. rises to 12,000 feet; and on the N.W. is much broken by depressions. Neison has seen a mound, with a minute crater W. of it, on the otherwise undisturbed interior.
It was thus that Descartes and Clairaut made geometry, which was already partially deductive, still more so, by pointing out the correspondence between geometrical and algebraical properties.
It would be quite impossible for a student who confined his reading to the "Mecanique Celeste" to gather from any indications that it contains whether the discoveries about which he was reading had been really made by Laplace himself or whether they had not been made by Lagrange, or by Euler, or by Clairaut.
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