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The calculation of Huyghens was founded upon hypothetic properties of the attractive force which were wholly inadmissible; that of Newton upon a theorem which he ought to have demonstrated; the theory of the latter was characterized by a defect of a still more serious nature: it supposed the density of the earth during the original state of fluidity, to be homogeneous.
Nay, we know that if either Galileo or Hevelius had been at the pains to reason out the meaning of the alternate visibility and disappearance of objects looking like attendant planets, they must have anticipated the discovery made in 1656 by Huyghens, that Saturn's globe is girdled about by a thin flat ring so vast that, if a score of globes like our earth were set side by side, the range of that row of worlds would be less than the span of the Saturnian ring system.
He expounded the laws of the motion of the pendulum, increased the power of the telescope, invented the micrometer, discovered the rings and satellites of Saturn, constructed the first pendulum clock, and a machine, called the gunpowder machine, in principle the precursor of the steam engine. For sheer brain power and inventive genius Christian Huyghens was a giant.
Newton, reflecting on the observations of Huyghens, came to the conclusion that each of the beams transmitted by Iceland spar had two sides; and from the analogy of this two-sidedness with the two-endedness of a magnet, wherein consists its polarity, the two beams came subsequently to be described as polarized.
The Savery principle still survives in the action of the well-known pulsometer steam pump. Denys Papin, the pupil and assistant of Huyghens, continued experimenting upon the production of motive power, and in 1690 published a description of his attempts at Leipzig, entitled "A New Method of Securing Cheaply Motive Power of Considerable Magnitude."
As mathematicians Simon Stevin, the friend and instructor of Maurice of Orange, and Francis van Schooten, the Leyden Professor, who numbered among his pupils Christian Huyghens and John de Witt, did much excellent work in the earlier years of the century.
Back, of Wolverhampton, in the year 1711. Thirty-one years before this time, in Paris year 1680 Huyghens presented a memoir to the Academy of Sciences describing a method of utilizing the expansive force of gunpowder. This engineer is notable as being the very first to propose the use of a cylinder and piston, as well as the first combustion engine of a practical kind.
It was not till after the middle of the century, when the telescope had been made part of astronomical instruments for finding the altitude of a heavenly body, and after the pendulum clock had been invented by Huyghens, that the time of an occultation could be fixed with the required exactness.
When Huyghens, in 1656, published his Systema Saturnium, where he first set forth the mystery of the rings of Saturn, which, for nearly half a century, had perplexed telescopic observers, he prefaced it with a remark that many, even among the learned, might condemn his course in devoting so much time and attention to matters far outside the earth, when he might better be studying subjects of more concern to humanity.
Newton's preponderance was in some degree due to the fact that, though Huyghens and Euler were right in the main, they did not possess sufficient data to prove themselves right. No human authority, however high, can maintain itself against the voice of Nature speaking through experiment. But the voice of Nature may be an uncertain voice, through the scantiness of data.
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