"The application of the general doctrines of mechanics to fluids was a natural and inevitable step, when the principles of the science had been generalised. It was easily seen that a fluid is, for this purpose, nothing more than a body of which the parts are moveable amongst each other with entire facility; and that the mathematician must trace the consequences of this condition upon his equations. This accordingly was done, by the founders of mechanics, both for the cases of the equilibrium and of motion. ... The explanation of the Tides, in the way in which Newton attempted it in the third book of the Principia, is another example of a hydrostatical investigation: for he considered only the form that the ocean would have if it were at rest. The memoirs of Maclaurin, Daniel Bernoulli, and Euler, on the question of the tides, which shared among them the prize of the Academy of Sciences in 1740, went upon the same views. The Treatise of the Figure of the Earth by Clairaut, in 1743, extended Newton's solution of the same problem, by supposing a solid nucleus covered with a fluid of different density. No peculiar novelty has been introduced into this subject, except a method employed by Laplace for determining the attractions of s of small eccentricity, which is, as Professor Airy has said, "a calculus the most singular in its nature, and the most powerful in its effects, of any which has yet appeared.""