It is indeed by no means easy to distinguish and apportion the respective merits of the competitors.

The latter have the management of county buildings, such as courthouses ar,d prisons, have power to lay out new main highways, to grant licences, and to apportion among the towns and cities the taxation necessary to meet county expenses.

(Halle, 1899; London, 1902), apportion praise and blame more equally; J.

Such bodies, established to appraise land for railway purposes, to apportion receipts and expenditures of interstate traffic, and in a general way to supervise railway transportation, had been in existence in New England before 1860, one of the earliest being that of Rhode Island in 1839.

The proper share of each in bringing about this memorable result is not easy to apportion, since they freely imparted and profited by one another's advances and improvements; it need only be said that the fundamental proposition of the invariability of the planetary major axes laid down with restrictions by Laplace in 1773, was finally established by Lagrange in 1776; while Laplace in 1784 proved the subsistence of such a relation between the eccentricities of the planetary orbits on the one hand, and their inclinations on the other, that an increase of either element could, in any single case, proceed only to a very small extent.