important result was first reached by Lagrange, sometimes it was
Laplace who had the good fortune to make the discovery. It would
doubtless be a difficult matter to draw the line which should exactly
separate the contributions to astronomy made by one of these
illustrious mathematicians, and the contributions made by the other.
But in his great work Laplace in the loftiest manner disdained to
accord more than the very barest recognition to Lagrange, or to any
of the other mathematicians, Newton alone excepted, who had advanced
our knowledge of the mechanism of the heavens. 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. With our present standard of morality in such
matters, any scientific man who now brought forth a work in which he
presumed to ignore in this wholesale fashion the contributions of
others to the subject on which he was writing, would be justly
censured and bitter controversies would undoubtedly arise. Perhaps
we ought not to judge Laplace by the standard of our own time, and in
any case I do not doubt that Laplace might have made a plausible
defence. It is well known that when two investigators are working at
the same subjects, and constantly publishing their results, it
sometimes becomes difficult for each investigator himself to
distinguish exactly between what he has accomplished and that which
must be credited to his rival. Laplace may probably have said to
himself that he was going to devote his energies to a great work on
the interpretation of Nature, that it would take all his time and all
his faculties, and all the resources of knowledge that he could
command, to deal justly with the mighty problems before him. He
would not allow himself to be distracted by any side issue. He could