Page:A philosophical essay on probabilities Tr. Truscott, Emory 1902.djvu/102

92 during six consecutive years. The situation of this port is very favorable to this sort of observations; it communicates with the sea by a canal which empties into a vast roadstead at the far end of which the port has been constructed. The irregularities of the sea extend thus only to a small degree into the port, just as the oscillations which the irregular movement of a vessel produces in a barometer are diminished by a throttling made in the tube of this instrument. Moreover, the tides being considerable at Brest, the accidental variations caused by the winds are only feeble; likewise we notice in the observations of these tides, however little we multiply them, a great regularity which induced me to propose to the government to order in this port a new series of observations of the tides, continued during a period of the movement of the nodes of the lunar orbit. This has been done. The observations began June 1, 1806; and since this time they have been made every day without interruption. I am indebted to the indefatigable zeal of M. Bouvard, for all that interests astronomy, the immense calculations which the comparison of my analysis with the observations has demanded. There have been used about six thousand observations, made during the year 1807 and the fifteen years following. It results from this comparison that my formulæ represent with a remarkable precision all the varieties of the tides relative to the digression of the moon, from the sun, to the declination of these stars, to their distances from the earth, and to the laws of variation at the maximum and minimum of each of these elements. There results from this accord a probability that the flow and the ebb