earth on Newtonian lines, and the appearance six years later of Voltaire's extremely readable Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton had a great effect in popularising the new ideas. The last official recognition of Cartesianism in France seems to have been in 1740, when the prize offered by the Academy for an essay on the tides was shared between a Cartesian and three eminent Newtonians (§ 230).
The rapid development of gravitational astronomy that ensued between this time and the beginning of the 19th century was almost entirely the work of five great Continental mathematicians, Euler, Clairaut, D'Alembert, Lagrange, and Laplace, of whom the eldest was born in 1707 and the youngest died in 1827, within a month of the centenary of Newton's death. Euler was a Swiss, Lagrange was of Italian birth but French by extraction and to a great extent by adoption, and the other three were entirely French. France therefore during nearly the whole of the 18th century reigned supreme in gravitational astronomy, and has not lost her supremacy even to-day, though during the present century America, England, Germany, Italy, and other countries have all made substantial contributions to the subject.
It is convenient to consider first the work of the three first-named astronomers, and to treat later Lagrange and Laplace, who carried gravitational astronomy to a decidedly higher stage of development than their predecessors.
230. Leonhard Euler was born at Basle in 1707, 14 years later than Bradley and six years earlier than Lacaille. He was the son of a Protestant minister who had studied mathematics under James Bernouilli (1654–1705), the first of a famous family of mathematicians. Leonhard Euler himself was a favourite pupil of John Bernouilli (the younger brother of James), and was an intimate friend of his two sons, one of whom, Daniel (1700–1782), was not only a distinguished mathematician like his father and uncle, but was also the first important Newtonian outside Great Britain. Like so many other astronomers, Euler began by studying theology, but was induced both by his natural tastes and by the influence of the Bernouillis to turn his attention to mathematics. Through the influence of Daniel Bernouilli, who had recently been appointed to a professorship at
