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Laplace considered it to be very improbable, if the ring was immovable, that its constituent parts should be capable of resisting by their mere cohesion the continual attraction of the planet. A movement of rotation occurred to his mind as constituting the principle of stability, and he hence deduced the necessary velocity.
The supper passed most agreeably, Matta drinking more than usual to stifle some remaining scruples. The chevalier, brilliant as ever, kept his guest in continual merriment, whom he was soon to make so serious; and Caméran's ardour was divided between the good cheer on the table and the play that was to follow. Meanwhile, the trusty Laplace drew up his men in the darkness.
This gave the brilliant young mathematician the opening for which he sought, and he quickly availed himself of it. Laplace was twenty-three years old when his first memoir on a profound mathematical subject appeared in the Memoirs of the Academy at Turin.
Laplace, therefore, laid the responsibility of the acceleration upon the moon; and if his views were correct, the tidal retardation must either be insignificant in amount, or be counteracted by some other agency.
"Give me matter," says Kant, "and I will build the world;" and he proceeds to deduce from the simple data from which he starts, a doctrine in all essential respects similar to the well-known "Nebular Hypothesis" of Laplace.
According to the cosmogonic ideas of Laplace, comets did not originally form part of the solar system; they are not formed at the expense of the matter of the immense solar nebula; we must consider them as small wandering nebulæ which the attractive force of the sun has caused to deviate from their original route.
The grand conception of a gradual becoming, instead of a sudden making, which Kant and Laplace thus applied to the component bodies of the universe at large, was further applied by Lyell and his school to the outer crust of this one particular petty planet of ours.
As to communicating with our ancient colleagues upon earth, that will not be difficult." "How are we to do that, pray?" "By means of meteors hurled by the lunar volcanoes." "A good idea, Michel," answered Barbicane. "Laplace has calculated that a force five times superior to that of our cannons would suffice to send a meteor from the moon to the earth.
It must be acknowledged, however, that the idea of Lavoisier and Laplace was rather vague and even inexact on one important point. They admitted it to be evident that "all variations of heat, whether real or apparent, undergone by a bodily system when changing its state, are produced in inverse order when the system passes back to its original state."
These minute details will be my only answer to some culpable expressions that I have met with in a work very widely spread: "M. Laplace," says the anonymous writer "knew all the secrets of geometry; but he had not the least notion of the state France was in, he therefore imprudently advised Bailly to go and join him."
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