Never did a question of astronomy excite a more intense, a more legitimate curiosity.  All classes of society awaited with equal interest the announced apparition.  A Saxon peasant, Palitzch, first perceived the comet.  Henceforward, from one extremity of Europe to the other, a thousand telescopes traced each night the path of the body through the constellations.  The route was always, within the limits of precision of the calculations, that which Clairaut had indicated beforehand.  The prediction of the illustrious geometer was verified in regard both to time and space:  astronomy had just achieved a great and important triumph, and, as usual, had destroyed at one blow a disgraceful and inveterate prejudice.  As soon as it was established that the returns of comets might be calculated beforehand, those bodies lost for ever their ancient prestige.  The most timid minds troubled themselves quite as little about them as about eclipses of the sun and moon, which are equally subject to calculation.  In fine, the labours of Clairaut had produced a deeper impression on the public mind than the learned, ingenious, and acute reasoning of Bayle.

The heavens offer to reflecting minds nothing more curious or more strange than the equality which subsists between the movements of rotation and revolution of our satellite.  By reason of this perfect equality the moon always presents the same side to the earth.  The hemisphere which we see in the present day is precisely that which our ancestors saw in the most remote ages; it is exactly the hemisphere which future generations will perceive.

The doctrine of final causes which certain philosophers have so abundantly made use of in endeavouring to account for a great number of natural phenomena was in this particular case totally inapplicable.  In fact, how could it be pretended that mankind could have any interest in perceiving incessantly the same hemisphere of the moon, in never obtaining a glimpse of the opposite hemisphere?  On the other hand, the existence of a perfect, mathematical equality between elements having no necessary connection—­such as the movements of translation and rotation of a given celestial body—­was not less repugnant to all ideas of probability.  There were besides two other numerical coincidences quite as extraordinary; an identity of direction, relative to the stars, of the equator and orbit of the moon; exactly the same precessional movements of these two planes.  This group of singular phenomena, discovered by J.D.  Cassini, constituted the mathematical code of what is called the Libration of the Moon.

The libration of the moon formed a very imperfect part of physical astronomy when Lagrange made it depend on a circumstance connected with the figure of our satellite which was not observable from the earth, and thereby connected it completely with the principles of universal gravitation.