importance; whereas the periodic inequalities of the planets are generally small and the secular inequalities are the most interesting.
The method of treating the elements of the elliptic orbits as variable is specially suitable for secular inequalities; but for periodic inequalities it is generally better to treat the body as being disturbed from an elliptic path, and to study these deviations.
"The simplest way of regarding these various perturbations consists in imagining a planet moving in accordance with the laws of elliptic motion, on an ellipse the elements of which vary by insensible degrees; and to conceive at the same time that the true planet oscillates round this fictitious planet in a very small orbit the nature of which depends on its periodic perturbations."[1]
The former method, due as we have seen in great measure to Euler, was perfected and very generally used by Lagrange, and often bears his name.
243. It was at first naturally supposed that the slow alteration in the rates of the motions of Jupiter and Saturn (§§ 235, 236, and chapter x., § 204) was a secular inequality; Lagrange in 1766 made an attempt to explain it on this basis which, though still unsuccessful, represented the observations better than Euler's work. Laplace in his first paper on secular inequalities (1773) found by the use of a more complete analysis that the secular alterations in the rates of motions of Jupiter and Saturn appeared to vanish entirely, and attempted to explain the motions by the hypothesis, so often used by astronomers when in difficulties, that a comet had been the cause.
In 1773 John Henry Lambert (1728–1777) discovered from a study of observations that, whereas Halley had found Saturn to be moving more slowly than in ancient times, it was now moving faster than in Halley's time—a conclusion which pointed to a fluctuating or periodic cause of some kind.
Finally in 1784 Laplace arrived at the true explanation. Lagrange had observed in 1776 that if the times of revolution of two planets are exactly proportional to two whole
- ↑ Laplace, Système du Monde.
