his labours, he is obliged to plunge into numerical calculations of
repelling length and intricacy. Some observations that have been made in
less than a minute, require a whole day's work in order to be compared
with the tables.

Such was the view that Lacaille, without any softening, exhibited to his
young friend; such was the profession into which the adolescent poet
plunged with great ardour, and without having been at all prepared for
the transition.

A useful calculation constituted the first claim of our tyro to the
attention of the learned world.

The year 1759 had been marked by one of those great events, the memory
of which is religiously preserved in scientific history. A comet, that
of 1682, had returned at the epoch foretold by Clairaut, and very nearly
in the region that mathematical analysis had indicated to him. This
reappearance raised comets out of the category of sublunary meteors; it
gave them definitely closed curves as orbits, instead of parabolas, or
even mere straight lines; attraction confined them within its immense
domain; in short, these bodies ceased for ever to be liable to
superstition regarding them as prognostics.

The stringency, the importance of these results, would naturally
increase in proportion as the resemblance between the announced orbit
and the real orbit became more evident.

This was the motive that determined so many astronomers to calculate the
orbit of the comet minutely, from the observations made in 1759,
throughout Europe. Bailly was one of those zealous calculators. In the