it was necessary to strip them of every vestige of that antique dress in which he had delighted to clothe them. This, however, the countrymen of Newton were very unwilling to do; and they paid the penalty in finding themselves condemned to the situation of lookers on, while their continental neighbours both in Germany and France were pushing forward in the career of mathematico-physical discovery with emulous rapidity.
(304.) The legacy of research which Newton may be said to have left to his successors was truly immense. To pursue, through all its intricacies, the consequences of the law of gravitation; to account for all the inequalities of the planetary movements, and the infinitely more complicated, and to us more important ones, of the moon; and to give, what Newton himself certainly never entertained a conception of, a demonstration of the stability and permanence of the system, under all the accumulating influence of its internal perturbations; this labour, and this triumph, were reserved for the succeeding age, and have been shared in succession by Clairaut, D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange and Laplace. Yet so extensive is the subject, and so difficult and intricate the purely mathematical enquiries to which it leads, that another century may yet be required to go through with the task. The recent discoveries of astronomers have supplied matter for investigation, to the geometers of this and the next generation, of a difficulty far surpassing any thing that had before occurred. Five primary planets have been added to our system; four of them since the commencement of the present century, and these, sin-
