er thing we notice is that the inner planetary subsystem may become unstable more rapidly than the outer one because of its shorter orbital time-scales. This can be seen in the panels denoted asinner 4 in Fig. 7 where the longer-periodic and irregular oscillations are more apparent than in the panels denoted astotal 9. Actually， the fluctuations in theinner 4 panels are to a large extent as a result of the orbital variation of the Mercury. However， we cannot neglect the contribution from other terrestrial planets， as we will see in subsequent sections.
4.4 Long-term coupling of several neighbouring planet pairs
Let us see some individual variations of planetary orbital energy and angular momentum expressed by the low-pass filtered Delaunay elements. Figs 10 and 11 show long-term evolution of the orbital energy of each planet and the angular momentum in N+1 and N2 integrations. We notice that some planets form apparent pairs in terms of orbital energy and angular momentum exchange. In particular， Venus and Earth make a typical pair. In the figures， they show negative correlations in exchange of energy and positive correlations in exchange of angular momentum. The negative correlation in exchange of orbital energy means that the two planets form a closed dynamical system in terms of the orbital energy. The positive correlation in exchange of angular momentum means that the two planets are simultaneously under certain long-term perturbations. Candidates for perturbers are Jupiter and Saturn. Also in Fig. 11， we can see that Mars shows a positive correlation in the angular momentum variation to the Venus–Earth system. Mercury exhibits certain negative correlations in the angular momentum versus the Venus–Earth system， which seems to be a reaction caused by the conservation of angular momentum in the terrestrial planetary subsystem.
It is not clear at the moment why the Venus–Earth pair exhibits a negative correlation in energy exchange and a positiv