SIR ISAAC NEWTON-TRINITY COLLEGE. SIR ISAAC NEWTON, whose name is cherished with just pride at Cambridge, where he was admitted as subsizar of Trinity College at the age of eighteen (b. Dec. 25, 1642), in June, 1660, and matriculated as Sizar in July of the same year, was made Scholar in 1664, Bachelor of Arts in 1665, Junior Fellow in 1667, and Master of Arts and Senior Fellow in 1688. In the year following, 1669, he he succeeded Dr. Barrow a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, and with a salary sufficient to meet his expenses, he devoted himself exclusively to study and teaching. Newton entered on his University studies at least three years in advance of the average age of college students at that period, with both body and mind invigorated by wholesome labor on the farm, and by the ingenious use of tools to gratify his taste for mechanics and carpentering. The dials which he made on the walls of his family house at Woolsthorpe were cut out by Mr. Turner (the proprietor, in 1830), and presented, framed in glass for preservation, to the Royal Society, of which this son of a small farmer died the honored president. He carried his taste and habits into his studies in natural philosophy, and his practical duties as Warden and Master of the Mint. The telescope, by which he demonstrated some of his theories of light, was manufactured with his own hands in 1671. For twenty-six years Newton made his residence in Trinity College, and was seldom out of town more than two or three weeks at a time-although during this period he was member of Parliament for the University. He lectured on Optics in the year following his appointment, as well as on Elementary Mathematics. The Arithmetica Universalis was taken from the lectures delivered by him on Algebra and its application to Geometry. The great discovery of the unequal refrangibility of the rays of light was made in 1666, the year in which he was driven from Cambridge by the plague. In 1668 he resumed his inquiries, and, judging that the decomposition of light which he had discovered would render it impossible to construct refracting telescopes free from color or achromatic, he applied himself to the improvement of the reflecting telescope. The researches on the colors of thin plates, and the explanation known by the name of the Theory of Fits of Reflection and Transmission, was communicated to the Royal Society in 1765-6. Those on the inflection of light, though probably made long before 1704, first appeared in that year, in his treatise on Optics. Newton first turned his attention to the subject of matter acting upon matter as an attractive force in 1666, at Woolsthorpe; sitting alone in a garden, his thoughts turned towards that power of gravity which extends to the tops of the highest mountains, and the question whether the power which retains the moon in her orbit might not be the same force as that which gives its curvature to the flight of a stone on the earth. To deduct from what Kepler had exhibited of the laws of the planetary motions, that the force must vary inversely as the square of the distance, came within his power; but on trying the value of that force, as deduced from the moon's actual motion, with what it should be as deduced from the force of gravitation at the earth, so great a difference was found as to make him throw the subject aside. The reason of his failure was the inaccurate measure which he used of the size of the earth. In 1679 he repeated the trial with Picard's measure of the earth; and it is said that when he saw that the • A sizar at Cambridge, in the original meaning of the word, was a student who lived by the work of his hands in some personal service to the College or its officers, while he pursued his studies. This service is no longer required, and the sizar differs from other class students only that he pay no college dues. desired agreement was likely to appear, he became so nervous that he could not continue the calculation, but was obliged to intrust it to a friend. From that moment the great discovery must be dated; the connection of his speculations on motion with the actual phenomena of the universe was established. At the end of 1688 Halley had been considering the question, and had been stopped by its difficulties; but, being in August, 1684, on a visit to Newton, the latter informed him of what he had done, but was not able to find his papers. After Halley's departure, he wrote them again, and sent them; upon which Halley paid another visit to Cambridge, to urge upon Newton the continuance of his researches; and (December, 1684) informed the Royal Society of them, and of Newton's promise to communicate them. In February, 1684, a communication was sent to the Society, amounting to those parts of the first Book of the Principia which relate to central forces. Newton went on with the work, and (April 21, 1686) Halley announced to the Society that 'Mr. Newton had an incomparable treatise on Motion, almost ready for the press.' On the 28th, Dr. Vincent (the husband, it is supposed, of Miss Storey) presented the manuscript of the first book to the Society, who ordered it to be printed, and Halley undertook to pay the expenses. It appeared under the title of Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica, abont Midsummer, 1687, containing the mathematical discussion of the laws of solid and fluid motion, with their application to the heavenly motions, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, &c., &c. No work on any branch of human knowledge was ever destined to effect so great a change, or to originate such important consequences. About 1664, Newton turned his attention to the writings of Des Cartes and Wallis, and, in the path which the latter had gone over, found the celebrated Binomial Theorem: Wallis having in fact solved what would now be called a harder problem. This, far from lessening the merit of the discovery, increases it materially. In 1665 Newton arrived at his discoveries in series, and substantially at his method of fluctions. In a letter to Collins, in 1672, he states a mode of using one case of this method, confined to equations of what are called rational terms (it being admitted on all sides that the great pinch of the question then lay in equations of irrational terms). Leibnitz, who had been in England in 1673, and had heard something indefinite of what Newton had done, desired to know more; and Newton, June 13th, 1676, wrote a letter to Oldenburg, of the Royal Society, which he desired might be communicated to Leibnitz. This letter dwells on the binomial theorem, and various consequences of it; but has nothing upon fluctions. Leibnitz still desiring further information, Newton again wrote to Oldenburg, October 24th, 1676, explaining how he arrived at the binomial theorem, giving various other results, but nothing about fluctions except in what is called a cipher. In the meantime Leibnitz pursued the subject, and in June, 1677, wrote to Oldenburg a full and clear statement of everything he had arrived at; making an epoch as important in the pure mathematics as was the discovery of the moon's gravitation in the physical sciences. In the Principia, Newton acknowledges this in the following Scholium: 'In letters which went between me and that most excellent geometer G. G. Leibnitz, ten years ago, when I signified that I was in the knowledge of a method of determining maxima and minima, of drawing tangents and the like, and when I concealed it in transferred letters involving this sentence (Data æquatione, &c., as above), that most distinguished man wrote back that he had also fallen upon a method of the same kind, and communicated his method, which hardly differed from mine except in the forms of words and symbols.' In 1694 Lord Halifax (Newton's old friend Charles Montague) became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and it was one of his plans to restore the adulterated coinage. He served both his friend and his plan by making Newton warden of the Mint, a place of five or six hundred a year (March 19, 1695). In 1699, Newton was made Master of the Mint, on which occasion he resigned to Whiston, as his deputy, the duties and emoluments of the Lucasian Professorship, and resigned to him the professorship itself in 1703. In 1701 he was again elected member for the University; but he was turned out by two sons of lords in 1705. In 1703 he was chosen President of the Royal Society, and was annually re-elected during the rest of his life. In 1706, he was knighted at Cambridge by Queen Anne. In 1709, he entrusted to Roger Cotes the preparation of the second edition of the Principia, which appeared in 1713. All the correspondence relating to the alterations made in this edition is in the library of Trinity College. In 1714, at the accession of George I., he became an intimate acquaintance of the Princess of Wales (wife of George II.), who was also a correspondent of Leibnitz. Some observations made by the latter on the philosophy of Locke and of Newton brought on the celebrated correspondence between Leibnitz and Clarke. And at the same time, an abstract of Newton's ideas on chronology, drawn up for the Princess, and at her request communicated to Conti, got abroad and was printed at Paris; on which, in his own defense, he prepared his large work on the subject. In 1726, Dr. Pemberton completed, at his request, the third edition of the Principia. With this he seems to have had little to do, for his health had been declining since 1722. He was relieved by gout in 1725, February 28, 1726-7, he presided for the last time at the Royal Society. Ho died of the stone (so far as so old a man can be said to die of one complaint) on the 20th of March. His biographer, Prof. A. De Morgan, in the Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies, from whose article the above memoir has been drawn, does not think it right to ignore the inherited weaknesses of this remarkable man-his morbid dread of opposition, his fearful, cautious and suspicious temper, and his unwil lingness to decline or give up a lucrative position as Warden of the Mint, for the glorious career as a thinker in which he had outstripped all men, and the re searches which were for him alone. Thousands of his countrymen could have done all that he did for the restoration of the coinage, but hardly one of the thousand would have kept himself as unspotted, or even unsuspected of pe cuniary or moral taint, in such licentions and corrupted surroundings. The mind of Newton, as a philosopher, is to this day, and to the most dispas sionate readers of his works, the object of the same sort of wonder with which it was regarded by his contemporaries. We can compare it with nothing which the popular reader can understand, except the idea of a person who is superior to others in every kind of athletic exercise; who can outrun his competitors with a greater weight than any one of them can lift standing. There is a union, in excessive quantity, of different kinds of force: a combination of the greatest mathematician with the greatest thinker upon experimental truths; of the most sagacious observer with the deepest reflector. Not infallible, but committing, after the greatest deliberation, a mistake in a single point of mathematics, such as might have happened to any one: yet so happy in his conjectures, as to seem to know more than he could possibly have had any means of proving. Carrying his methods to such a point that his immediate successors could not clear one step in advance of him until they had given the weapons with which himself and Leibnitz had furnished them a complete new edge, yet apparently solicitous to hide his use of the most efficient of these weapons, and to give his researches the appearance of having been produced by something as much as possible resembling older methods. We append a letter addressed by this great philosopher to a friend about to visit the Continent, to show the practical side of his mind. We shall also give a brief memoir of his friend Halley. LETTER OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON TO FRANCIS ASTON.* SIR, Since in your letter you give mee so much liberty of spending my judgement about what may be to your advantage in travelling, I shall do it more freely than perhaps otherwise would have been decent. First, then, I will lay down some general rules, most of which, I believe, you have considered already; but if any of them be new to you, they may excuse the rest; if none at all, yet is my punishment more in writing than yours in reading. When you come into any fresh company, 1. Observe their humours. 2. Suit your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their converse more free and open. 3. Let your discours be more in querys and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being the designe of travellers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrepect and quarrels than peremtorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming wiser or much more ignorant than your company. 4. Seldom discommend any thing though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you be unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to commend any thing more than it deserves, than to discommend a thing soe much as it deserves; for condemnations meet not soe often with oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison. 5. If you bee affronted, it is better, in a forraine country, to pass it by in silence, and with a jest, though with, some dishonour, than to endeavour revenge; for, in the first case, your credit's ne'er the worse when you return into England, or come into other company that have not heard of the quarrell. But, in the second case, you may bear the marks of the quarrell while you live, if you outlive it at all. But, if you find yourself unavoidably engaged, 'tis best, I think, if you can command your passion and language, to keep them pretty evenly at some certain moderate pitch, not much hightning them to exasperate your adver * Mr. Aston, to whom Newton, then a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, (aged 26), addressed a letter, on the eve of his departure for a tour of observation on the Continent, was a member of the same College, and in 1678 became Fellow of the Royal Society, in which he held the office of Secretary from 1681 to 1685. tain vitrioll came from thence (called Roman vitrioll), but of a nobler virtue than that which is now called by that name; which vitrioll is not now to be gotten, because, perhaps, they make a greater gain by some such trick as turning iron into copper with it than by selling it. 2. Whether, in Hungary, Sclavonia, Bohemia, near the town Eila, or at the mountains of Bohemia near Silesia, there be rivers whose waters are impregnated with gold; perhaps, the gold being dissolved by some corrosive waters like aqua regis, and the solution carried along with the streame, that runs through the mines. And whether the practice of laying mercury in the rivers till it be tinged with gold, and then straining the mercury through leather, that the gold may stay behind, be a secret yet, or openly practised. 3. There is newly contrived, in Holland, a mill to grind glasses plane withall, and I think polishing them too; perhaps it will be worth the while to see it. 4. There is in Holland Borry, who some years since was imprisoned by the Pope, to have extorted from him secrets (as I am told) of great worth, both as to medicine and profit, but he escaped into Holland, where they have granted him a guard. I think he usually goes clothed in green. Pray inquire what you can of him, and whether his ingenuity be any profit to the Dutch. You may inform yourself whether the Dutch have any tricks to keep their ships from being all wormeaten in their vogages to the Indies. Whether pendulum clocks do any service in finding out the longitude, &c. one I am very weary, and shall not stay to part with a long compliment, only I wish you a good journey, and God be with you. IS. NEWTON. Pray let us hear from you in your travells. I have given your two books to Dr. Arrowsmith. In a letter to Dr. Bentley (Dec. 10, 1692,) Sir Isaac (then Mr.) Newton remarks, that in composing the Third Book of the Principia, he had an eye upon such principles as might work, with considering men, for the belief of a Deity, and he expresses his happiness that it has been found useful for that purpose.' The modesty of this great philosopher is a remarkable feature in his character. 'I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell then ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.' |