restoration Laplace received the title of Marquis, and did not appear at the Court of Napoleon during the hundred days. He continued his usual pursuits until the year 1827, when he was seized with the disorder which terminated his life on the 5th of May, in the seventy-eighth year of his age. His last words were, “Ce que nous connoissons est peu de chose; ce que nous ignorons est immense.” He has left a successor to his name and title, but none to his transcendent powers of investigation. Footnote 4: A scanty account in the _Biographie des Contemporains_, and the Eloge read to the Institute by M. Fourier, form our only materials for the personal life of LAPLACE. The name of Laplace is spread to the utmost limits of civilization, as the successor, almost the equal, of Newton. No one, however, who is acquainted with the discoveries of the two, will think there is so much common ground for comparison as is generally supposed. Those of Laplace are all essentially mathematical: whatever could be done by analysis he was sure to achieve. The labours of Newton, on the other hand, show a sagacity in conjecturing which would almost lead us to think that he laid the mathematics on one side, and used some faculty of perception denied to other men, to deduce these results which he afterwards condescended to put into a geometrical form, for the information of more common minds. In the Principia of Newton, the mathematics are not the instruments of discovery but of demonstration; and, though that work contains much which is new in a mathematical point of view, its principal merit is of quite another character. The mind of Laplace was cast in a different mould; and this perhaps is fortunate for science, for while we may safely assert that Laplace would never have been Newton had he been placed in similar circumstances, there is also reason to doubt whether a second Newton would have been better qualified to follow that particular path which was so successfully traversed by Laplace. We shall proceed to give such an idea of the labours of the latter as our limits will allow.