<P> It took nearly two centuries for the current formulation of Kepler's work to take on its settled form . Voltaire's Eléments de la philosophie de Newton (Elements of Newton's Philosophy) of 1738 was the first publication to use the terminology of "laws". The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers in its article on Kepler (p. 620) states that the terminology of scientific laws for these discoveries was current at least from the time of Joseph de Lalande . It was the exposition of Robert Small, in An account of the astronomical discoveries of Kepler (1804) that made up the set of three laws, by adding in the third . Small also claimed, against the history, that these were empirical laws, based on inductive reasoning . </P> <P> Further, the current usage of "Kepler's Second Law" is something of a misnomer . Kepler had two versions, related in a qualitative sense: the "distance law" and the "area law ." The "area law" is what became the Second Law in the set of three; but Kepler did himself not privilege it in that way . </P> <P> Johannes Kepler published his first two laws about planetary motion in 1609, having found them by analyzing the astronomical observations of Tycho Brahe . Kepler's third law was published in 1619 . Notably, Kepler had believed in the Copernican model of the solar system, which called for circular orbits, but could not reconcile Brahe's highly precise observations with a circular fit to Mars' orbit (Mars coincidentally having the highest eccentricity of all planets except Mercury). His first law reflected this discovery . </P> <P> Kepler in 1621 and Godefroy Wendelin in 1643 noted that Kepler's third law applies to the four brightest moons of Jupiter . The second law, in the "area law" form, was contested by Nicolaus Mercator in a book from 1664, but by 1670 his Philosophical Transactions were in its favour . As the century proceeded it became more widely accepted . The reception in Germany changed noticeably between 1688, the year in which Newton's Principia was published and was taken to be basically Copernican, and 1690, by which time work of Gottfried Leibniz on Kepler had been published . </P>

Who discovered the basic laws of planetary orbits