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his great principle, devoted his splendid in-
tellect to the calculation of its consequences.
He proved that if a body be projected with
any velocity in free space, subject only to a
central force, varying inversely as the square
of the distance, the body must revolve in a
curve which may be any one of the sections
of a cone–a circle, ellipse, parabola, or hy-
perbola; and he found that those comets of
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