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Laplace enounced his hypothesis in 1796, and republished it with supplementary details in 1808. Herschel had meanwhile ascertained the retrograde movement of the Uranian satellite-system, a circumstance highly damaging to the validity of the adopted line of reasoning; yet its author was content to leave it in jeopardy. He must, to be sure, have regretted that Nature had seen fit to mar the admirable symmetry indicative of her presumed plan of action, running counter thereby to the plainest teachings of the doctrine of probabilities. But he kept his own counsel on the subject, preferring that it should be discussed, as it has been in full detail, by posterity; and posterity has, at any rate, learned that the seeming caprices of Nature are often more instructive than her most harmonious regularity, and has derived a warning from her frequent breaches of continuity against the undue extension of apparently well-grounded inferences.

Nevertheless, the constructive scheme handed on by the eighteenth to the nineteenth century has not, up to the present, been consigned to the limbo of vanities. It accorded too profoundly with undoubted realities to be thus summarily disposed of. No one then living had studied the mechanism of the solar system so attentively, or was so intimately acquainted with its workings, as Pierre Simon Laplace. None knew better how admirable, yet how far from inevitable, were the adjustments by which its stability was secured. Long meditation upon their poise and plan persuaded him that the subsisting congruities of arrangement must have had their source in a community of origin. He thus acquired the settled conviction that the sun engendered his cortège, or was together with it engendered from one parent-mass. And this virtually new truth (for Kant's speculation had attracted a negligible amount of notice) was set forth by him with a directness and lucidity which won for it an immediate place among the permanent acquisitions of the human intellect. Few, perhaps, any longer believe that planetary formation took the precise course laid down for it in the Système du Monde, but fewer still doubt that the entire ambit of the solar system was once occupied by an inchoate sun, and that its component bodies came into being incidentally to that sun's progressive contraction.