We will now pass to the question of the permanence of the present condition of our system. For a long time the view was pretty generally held that, in its chief features at any rate, it was unchangeable. This opinion was based mainly on the conclusions at which Laplace had arrived as the final results of his long and laborious investigations, of the influence of planetary disturbances. By disturbances of the planetary motion astronomers understand, as I have already mentioned, those deviations from the purely elliptical motion which are due to the attraction of various planets and satellites upon each other. The attraction of the sun, as by far the largest body of our system, is indeed the chief and preponderating force which produces the motion of the planets. If it alone were operative, each of the planets would move continuously in a constant ellipse whose axes would retain the same direction and the same magnitude, making the revolutions always in the same length of time. But, in point of fact, in addition to the attraction of the sun there are the attractions of all other planets, which, though small, yet, in long periods of time, do effect slow changes in the plane, the direction, and the magnitude of the axes of its elliptical orbit. It has been asked whether these attractions in the orbit of the planet could go so far as to cause two adjacent planets to encounter each other, so that individual ones fall into the sun. Laplace was able to reply that this could not be the case; that all alterations in the planetary orbits produced by this kind of disturbance must periodically increase and decrease, and again revert to a mean condition. But it must not be forgotten that this result of Laplace’s investigations only applies to disturbances due to the reciprocal attraction of planets upon each other, and on the assumption that no forces of other kinds have any influence on their motions. On our earth we cannot produce such an everlasting motion as that of the planets seems to be; for resisting forces are continually being opposed to all movements of terrestrial bodies. The best known of these are what we call friction, resistance of the air, and inelastic impact. Hence the fundamental law of mechanics, according to which every motion of a body on which no force acts goes on in a straight line for ever with unchanged velocity, never holds fully.