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He asks us to believe that the God who was the first cause of creation, and knew everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with a fabulous and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth, and that since that day the same God has gradually changed or added to the inspiration, until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Darwin to contradict the teachings of the previous fifty thousand years.
As Laplace justly said: "These inequalities appeared formerly to be inexplicable by the law of gravitation they now form one of its most striking proofs." Let us take one more discovery of Halley, furnishing directly a new triumph for the theory.
It has been contended that these are not the only requisites, and that Laplace has overlooked, in the general theoretical statement, a necessary part of the foundation of the doctrine of chances. Experience must have shown that the two events are of equally frequent occurrence. Why, in tossing up a half-penny, do we reckon it equally probable that we shall throw cross or pile?
The illustrious commissioners of the prize, Laplace, Lagrange, and Legendre, while acknowledging the novelty and importance of the subject, while declaring that the real differential equations of the propagation of heat were finally found, asserted that they perceived difficulties in the way in which the author arrived at them.
Well, Laplace has solved the problem numerically without a base of any kind whatever; he has deduced the distance of the sun from observations of the moon made in one and the same place! The sun is, with respect to our satellite, the cause of perturbations which evidently depend on the distance of the immense luminous globe from the earth.
Finally, I had just terminated, under very difficult circumstances, the grandest triangulation which had ever been achieved, to prolong the meridian line from France as far as the island of Formentera. M. de Laplace, without denying the importance and utility of these labours and these researches, saw in them nothing more than indications of promise; M. Lagrange then said to him explicitly:
M. de Laplace did not reply upon the ground of the personal question, but he added, "I maintain that it is useful to young savans to hold out the position of member of the Institute as a future recompense, to excite their zeal."
The reader cannot fail to remark how, on certain occasions, the eyes of the mind can supply the want of the most powerful telescopes, and lead to astronomical discoveries of the highest importance. Let us descend from the heavens upon the earth. The discoveries of Laplace will appear not less important, not less worthy of his genius.
If Lambert had no other title to fame than the fact of his having formulated, in his sixteenth year, such a psychological dictum as this: "The events which bear witness to the action of the human race, and are the outcome of its intellect, have causes by which they are preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our minds before they are reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the perception of these causes" I think we may deplore in him a genius equal to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace.
We submitted our project to Laplace, who received it with ardour, procured the necessary funds, and the Government confided to us two this important mission. M. Biot, I, and the Spanish commissary Rodriguez departed from Paris in the commencement of 1806.
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