With this value of the density the mass of the earth is a little more than 13 billion billion pounds, or more precisely 13,136,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lbs.
220. While Greenwich was furnishing the astronomical world with a most valuable series of observations, the Paris Observatory had not fulfilled its early promise. It was in fact suffering, like English mathematics, from the evil effects of undue adherence to the methods and opinions of a distinguished man. Domenico Cassini happened to hold several erroneous opinions in important astronomical matters; he was too good a Catholic to be a genuine Coppernican, he had no belief in gravitation, he was firmly persuaded that the earth was flattened at the equator instead of at the poles, and he rejected Roemer’s discovery of the velocity of light. After his death in 1712 the directorship of the Observatory passed in turn to three of his descendants, the last of whom resigned office in 1793; and several members of the Maraldi family, into which his sister had married, worked in co-operation with their cousins. Unfortunately a good deal of their energy was expended, first in defending, and afterwards in gradually withdrawing from, the errors of their distinguished head. _Jacques Cassini_ for example, the second of the family (1677-1756), although a Coppernican, was still a timid one, and rejected Kepler’s law of areas; his son again, commonly known as _Cassini de Thury_ (1714-1784), still defended the ancestral errors as to the form of the earth; while the fourth member of the family, _Count Cassini_ (1748-1845), was the first of the family to accept the Newtonian idea of gravitation.
Some planetary and other observations of value were made by the Cassini-Maraldi school, but little of this work was of first-rate importance.
221. A series of important measurements of the earth, in which the Cassinis had a considerable share, were made during the 18th century, almost entirely by Frenchmen, and resulted in tolerably exact knowledge of the earth’s size and shape.
The variation of the length of the seconds pendulum observed by Richer in his Cayenne expedition (chapter VIII., § 161) had been the first indication of a deviation of the earth from a spherical form. Newton inferred, both from these pendulum experiments and from an independent theoretical investigation (chapter IX., § 187), that the earth was spheroidal, being flattened towards the poles; and this view was strengthened by the satisfactory explanation of precession to which it led (chapter IX., § 188).