# Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/28

Indeed, just as in lunar equations the astronomer need give but a negative value to time, in order to determine whether, when Pericles embarked for Epidaurus, the sun was eclipsed for the Piræus, so could the mind imagined by Laplace, by suitable application of its universal formula, tell us who was the Man in the Iron Mask, or how the President was lost. As the astronomer foretells the day whereon years hence a comet emerges again out of the depths of space into the heavens, so could that mind by its equations determine the day whereon the Greek cross shall glitter from the mosque of St. Sophia, or when England shall have consumed the last of her coals. If in his universal formula he set down t${\displaystyle =}$–∞, he could discover the mysterious primeval condition of all things. He would in the boundless space see matter already in motion, or unequally distributed, for, were the distribution equable, there could never be disturbance of equilibrium. Suppose he lets t grow ad infinitum in the positive sense, then he could tell whether Carnot's theorem threatens the universe with icy immobility in finite or only in infinite time. For such a mind the hairs of our heads would be numbered, and without his knowledge no sparrow could fall to the ground. Being a seer expert both in the past and the future, for him, as D'Alembert, in the Introduction to the Ency-