It is difficult to convey an adequate notion of the extreme complexity of the task thus executed. A number of bodies, all attracting each other, are to be projected in such a manner that their revolutions shall be permanent and stable, their mutual perturbations always small. If we return to the basin with its rolling balls, by which we before represented the solar system, we must complicate with new conditions the trial of skill which we supposed. The problem must now be to project at once seven such balls, all connected by strings which influence their movements, so that each may hit its respective mark. And we must further suppose, that the marks are to be hit after many thousand revolutions of the balls. No one will imagine that this could be done by accident. In fact it is allowed by all those who have considered this subject, that such a coincidence of the existing state with the mechanical requisites of permanency cannot be accidental. Laplace has attempted to calculate the probability that it is not the result of accident. He takes into account, in addition to the motions which we have mentioned, the revolutions of the satellites about their primaries, and of the sun and planets about their axes: and he finds that there is a probability, far higher than that which we have for the greater part of undoubted historical events, that these appearances are not the effect of chance. “We ought, therefore,” he says, “to believe, with at least the same confidence, that a primitive cause has directed the planetary motions.” The solar system is thus, by the confession of all sides, completely different from any thing which we might anticipate from the casual operation of its known laws. The laws of motion are no less obeyed to the letter in the most irregular than in the most regular motions; no less in the varied circuit of the ball which flies round a tennis court, than in the going of a clock; no less in the fantastical jets and leaps which breakers make when they burst in a corner of a rocky shore, than in the steady swell of the open sea. The laws of motion alone will not produce the regularity which we admire in the motions of the heavenly bodies. There must be an original adjustment of the system on which these laws are to act; a selection of the arbitrary quantities which they are to involve; a primitive cause which shall dispose the elements in due relation to each other, in order that regular recurrence may accompany constant change; that perpetual motion may be combined with perpetual stability; that derangements which go on increasing for thousands or for millions of years may finally cure themselves; and that the same laws which lead the planets slightly aside from their paths, may narrowly limit their deviations, and bring them back from their almost imperceptible wanderings.