It is recorded of Newton, that, toward the close of his wonderful calculations, when it seemed that the arithmetical results were to be in harmony with the dynamical problem to be solved, when he felt on the verge of determining one of the most important laws ever discovered by man, and which forever would bind the heavens to the earth—the nerves of the calculator gave way for a time, and he was unable to finish his task. He called in the aid of a friend, pacing the room in tumultuous agitation while the few last terms were being added. It is impossible for any other mind to realize the intensity of the geometer’s feelings when the result was announced! Knowing how trifling a novelty will at times agitate the finest minds, no wonder need be that Newton was affected by an uncontrollable tremor, when he saw that the discovery was made and tested, not only of the law that binds together the particles of matter which compose our earth, but also that which unites the heavenly orbs in all their majesty with the simplest of terrestrial phenomena; and demonstrates that, over the descent of a leaf in the forest—the drooping of a blade of grass—a pebble tossed upon the shore—a mote rising and falling in the sunbeam—a drop issuing from the rain-cloud—there is the same regulating power as that which retains the planets in their orbits, and determines their course through infinite space. Cuvier, in simple but eloquent words, has recorded, in the Introduction to his “Ossemens Fossiles,” the state of _his_ feelings as he established his discoveries, and proceeded in his task of reconstructing his singular menagerie from the dry bones of Montmartre in the basin of Paris. “I at length,” he says, “found myself as if placed in a charnel-house, surrounded by mutilated fragments of many hundred skeletons, of more than twenty kinds of animals, piled confusedly around me; and the task assigned me was to restore them all to their original position. At the voice of comparative anatomy, every bone and fragment of a bone resumed its place. I cannot find words to express the pleasure I experienced in seeing, as I discovered ONE CHARACTER, how all the consequences which I predicted from it were successively confirmed; the feet were found in accordance with the characters announced by the teeth; the teeth in harmony with those indicated beforehand by the feet; the bones of the legs and thighs, and every connecting portion of the extremities, were found set together precisely as I had arranged them before my conjectures were verified by the discovery of the parts entire; in short, each species was, as it were, reconstructed from a single one of its component elements.”