Page:A philosophical essay on probabilities Tr. Truscott, Emory 1902.djvu/114

104 sun, their speed at the moment of their entrance into its sphere of activity ought to have a magnitude and a direction confined within narrow limits. In determining by the analysis of probabilities the ratio of the chances which, in these limits, give an appreciable hyperbola, to the chances which give an orbit which may be confounded with a parabola, I have found that it is a bet of at least 6000 against one that a nebula which penetrates into the activity of the sun in such a manner as to be observed will describe either a very elongated ellipse or an hyperbola. By the magnitude of its axis, the latter will be appreciably confounded with a parabola in the part which is observed; it is then not surprising that, up to this time, hyperbolic movements have not been recognized.

The attraction of the planets, and, perhaps further, the resistance of the ethereal centres, ought to have changed many cometary orbits in the ellipses whose great axis is less than the radius of the sphere of activity of the sun, which augments the chances of the elliptical orbits. We may believe that this change has taken place with the comet of 1759, and with the comet whose duration is only twelve hundred days, and which will reappear without ceasing in this short interval, unless the evaporation which it meets at each of its returns to the perihelion ends by rendering it invisible.

We are able further, by the analysis of probabilities, to verify the existence or the influence of certain causes whose action is believed to exist upon organized beings. Of all the instruments that we are able to employ in order to recognize the imperceptible agents of nature the most sensitive are the nerves, especially when