Mathematicians have worked upon the problem in its various phases for nearly two centuries, and many improvements in detail have, from time to time, been made, but no general method, applicable to all cases, has been devised. One plan is to be used in treating the motion of the moon, another for the interior planets, another for Jupiter and Saturn, another for the minor planets, and so on. Under these circumstances it will not surprise you to learn that our tables of the celestial motions do not, in general, correspond in accuracy to the present state of practical astronomy. There is no authority and no office in the world whose duty it is to look after the preparations of the formulae I have described. The work of computing them has been almost entirely left to individual mathematicians whose taste lay in that direction, and who have sometimes devoted the greater part of their lives to calculations on a single part of the work. As a striking instance of this, the last great work on the Motion of the Moon, that of Delaunay, of Paris, involved some fifteen years of continuous hard labor. Hansen, of Germany, who died five years ago, devoted almost his whole life to investigations of this class and to the development of new methods of computation. His tables of the moon are those now used for predicting the places of the moon in all the ephemerides of the world. The only successful attempt to prepare systematic tables for all the large planets is that completed by Le Verrier just before his death; but he used only a small fraction of the material at his disposal, and did not employ the modern methods, confining himself wholly to those invented by his countrymen about the beginning of the present century. For him Jacobi and Hansen had lived in vain. The great difficulty which besets the subject arises from the fact that mathematical processes alone will not give us the position of a planet, there being seven unknown quantities for each planet which must be determined by observations. A planet, for instance, may move in any ellipse whatever, having the sun in one focus, and it is impossible to tell what ellipse it is, except from observation. The mean motion of a planet, or its period of revolution, can only be determined by a long series of observations, greater accuracy being obtained the longer the observations are continued. Before the time of Bradley, who commenced work at the Greenwich Observatory about 1750, the observations were so far from accurate that they are now of no use whatever, unless in exceptional cases. Even Bradley's observations are in many cases far less accurate than those made now. In consequence, we have not heretofore had a sufficiently extended series of observations to form an entirely satisfactory theory of the celestial motions.