highly important for some of the future wants of science in its manifold, complicated and rapidly-developing fields of inquiry, to arrive at.
Without, however, stepping into the region of conjecture, we will mention a particular problem which occurs to us at this moment as being an apt illustration of the use to which such an engine may be turned for determining that which human brains find it difficult or impossible to work out unerringly. In the solution of the famous problem of the Three Bodies, there are, out of about 295 coefficients of lunar perturbations given by M. Clausen (Astroe. Nachrichten, No. 406) as the result of the calculations by Burg, of two by Damoiseau, and of one by Burckhardt, fourteen coefficients that differ in the nature of their algebraic sign; and out of the remainder there are only 101 (or about one-third) that agree precisely both in signs and in amount. These discordances, which are generally small in individual magnitude, may arise either from an erroneous determination of the abstract coefficients in the development of the problem, or from discrepancies in the data deduced from observation, or from both causes combined. The former is the most ordinary source of error in astronomical computations, and this the engine would entirely obviate.
We might even invent laws for series or formulæ in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining. But this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a kind of philosophical amusement.A. A. L.
Note G.—Page 689.
It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formulæ of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for Mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject. There are in all extensions of human power, or additions to human
