Isaac Newton (33 page)

12
. Montague to Newton, March 19, 1696,
Corres
IV: 545.

13
. China, for example, placed a higher value on silver than Europe did, and arbitrage ensued. “Our silver must go to China till gold is dearer there or cheaper with us,” Newton wrote. “The trade for their gold must greatly increase our coin, being a profit to the nation.…” Craig,
Newton at the Mint
, p. 43.

14
. “Observations concerning the Mint,”
Corres
IV: 579.

15
. Newton and Ellis to Henry St John, September 1710,
Corres
V: 806.

16
. Signed, “Your near murderd humble Servant W. Chaloner.” Chaloner to Newton, March 6, 1699,
Corres
IV: 608.

17
. Memorandum, “Of the assaying of Gold and Silver, the making of indented Triall-pieces, and trying the moneys in the Pix,” Mint Papers (Public Record Office, Kew), I: f. 109. “A Scheme of a Commission for prosecuting Counterfeiters & Diminishers of the current coyn,” manuscript, Pierpont Morgan Library.

18
. He issued this bill first in April and then in December.

19
. Wallis to Newton,
Corres
IV: 503 and 567. Wallis added, “I should say the same about many things you keep hidden, of which I am not yet aware.”

20
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, p. 79.

21
. A Latin version of the
Opticks
appeared two years later, in 1706—long before the first English version of the
Principia
, in 1729.

22
.
Advertisement
to
Opticks
, first edition.

23
.
Opticks
, Query 29, p. 370.

24
. These are still called Newton’s rings. Nevertheless, reluctant though Newton was to admit it, the origins of this investigation lay in Hooke’s
Micrographia
.

25
.
Opticks
, book II, part 3, proposition XIII, p. 280. Cf. Westfall, “Uneasily Fitful Reflections on Fits of Easy Transmission,” in Palter,
Annus Mirabilis
, pp. 88–104.

26
. E.g.,
Opticks
, p. 376. Newton’s grandest metaphysical speculation—particularly the credo of Query 31—did not appear full-blown in the first edition, but evolved, beginning with the Latin edition of 1706.

27
.
Opticks
, p. 394.

28
.
Opticks
, p. 404.

29
. Francis Hauksbee, a former assistant of Robert Boyle, and then John Theophilus Desaguliers, later a renowned popularizer of Newton in prose and verse.

30
. Quoted in Heilbron,
Physics at the Royal Society
, p. 65.

31
.
Opticks
, p. 405.

32
.
Opticks
, pp. 399–400.

33
. The first French translation did not appear until 1720. Even so this preceded by thirty-six years the first—and only—French translation of the
Principia
, by Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, Voltaire’s friend and lover (“she was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman”). Her name, and not Newton’s, appeared on the title page. It was Châtelet who said of Cartesianism: “It is a house collapsing into ruins, propped up on every side.… I think it would be prudent to leave.”

34
. Guerlac,
Newton on the Continent
, p. 51 n.

35
. “I have even noticed certain things from which it appears that Dynamics, or the law of forces, are not deeply explored by him.” Leibniz to J. Bernoulli, March 29, 1715,
Corres
IV: 1138. Newton was well, if belatedly, aware of the danger of
sensorium
, and he backtracked in revising this passage.

36
. Alexander,
Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence
, p. 30. Howard Stein suggests that if Leibniz had understood the “incoherence” of his relativism, he would have been better equipped to appreciate gravitation. “Newton’s Metaphysics,” in Cohen and Smith,
Cambridge Companion to Newton
, p. 300.

37
. The so-called Epistola Posterior, Newton to Oldenburg, October 24, 1676,
Corres
II: 188. Cf.
Principia
651 n. The key is in Add MS 4004.

38
. “… which without our differential calculus no one could attack with such ease.”
Acta Eruditorum
, May 1684, trans. D. J. Struik, in Fauvel and Gray,
History of Mathematics
, p. 434.

39
. Newton’s letters to Leibniz first appeared in John Wallis’s third volume of
Opera Mathematica
in 1699—a deliberate marshaling of evidence. Barrow had sent Collins Newton’s
De Analysi per
Æ
quationes Infinitas
in 1669, and Collins, before returning it, had made at least one copy—which he showed Leibniz in 1676,

40
. John Keill,
Phil. Trans
. 26 (1709), quoted by Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 715.

41
.
Corres
V: xxiv.

42
. “An Account of the Book Entituled
Commercium Epistolicum, Collinii et Aliorum, de Analysi Promota
,”
Phil. Trans
. 342 (February 1715): 221.

43
. Ibid., pp. 205 and 206.

44
. Ibid., pp. 216, 209, and 208.

45
. Ibid., pp. 223–24.

46
. As L. J. Russell put it: “You might at any moment hit on a simple substitution, e.g. in an algebraic equation, or in a summation of a series, that would lead to a new general method.… Sometimes even the hint that someone had discovered a method for solving a particular problem was enough to set you looking in the right direction for solving it, and you could solve it too. In such a situation, what is needed is a general clearing house of publicity.” “Plagiarism in the Seventeenth Century, and Leibniz,” in Greenstreet,
Isaac Newton
, p. 135.

47
. Leibniz’s symbols did not map neatly onto the notation Newton had devised for his own use, dotted letters for fluxions and various alternatives for fluents, and the consequence was that British and Continental mathematics diverged throughout the eighteenth century. Finally, in the nineteenth, Leibniz’s differential notation prevailed over the dots even in England.

48
. Lenore Feigenbaum, “The Fragmentation of the European Mathematical Community,” in Harman and Shapiro,
Investigation of Difficult Things
, p. 384. She also quotes Whiteside, calling the controversy “a long-festering boil [that] polluted the whole European world for a decade afterwards with the corruption of its discharging pus.”
Math
VIII: 469.

49
. Baily,
Account of the Revd John Flamsteed
, p. 294. Flamsteed died soon after, having been Royal Astronomer forty-five years, and Halley took his place.

50
.
Math
VII: xxix.

51
. Leibniz to Rémond de Montmort, October 19, 1716, quoted in Manuel,
Portrait
, p. 333.

15: THE MARBLE INDEX OF A MIND

1
. Nicolson,
Science and Imagination
, p. 115.

2
. Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels
, III: 8.

3
.
Letters on England
, No. 13, p. 67.

4
.
Letters on England
, pp. 86 and 79–80. For a generation to come, Anglo-French rivalry colored Newton’s reception in France. He had been elected a foreign member of the Académie Royale in 1699 but had never acknowledged the honor or communicated with the academy. When French scientists meant “Newtonians,” they generally said, “les anglais.”

5
. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,
The Eloguim of Sir Isaac Newton
(London: Tonson, 1728), read to the Académie Royale des Sciences in November 1727; reprinted in Cohen, ed.,
Papers and Letters
, pp. 444–74; based in turn on John Conduitt’s “Memoir,” in
Isaac Newton: Eighteenth-Century Perspectives
, pp. 26–34. (“He had such a meekness and sweetness of temper.… His whole life was one continued series of labour, patience, charity, generosity, temperance, piety, goodness, and all other virtues, without a mixture of any vice whatsoever.”) In the contemporary manner, Fontenelle also embellished Newton’s ancestry: “descended from the elder branch of the family of Sir John Newton Baronet.… Manor of Woolstrope had been in his Family near 200 years.… Sir Isaac’s Mother … was likewise of an ancient family.…” In fairness to Fontenelle, he relied on a pedigree Newton had embellished himself, after being knighted.
   The supposedly singular laugh is originally due to Humphrey Newton; Stukeley (
Memoirs
, p. 57) considered this at length and said that he had often seen Newton laugh and that “he was easily made to smile, if not to laugh.”

6
. Quoted in Paul Elliott, “The Birth of Public Science,” p. 77.

7
. “… Nature her self to him resigns the Field,/ From him her Secrets are no more conceal’d.”
Gentleman’s Magazine
I (February 1731): 64.

8
.
Gentleman’s Magazine
I (April 1731): 157.

9
.
Epitaphs
(1730). Here Pope was serving a long, slow pitch to the twentieth century wag who replied: “It did not last: the Devil howling ‘Ho, / Let Einstein be,’ restored the status quo.” Koyré, “The Newtonian Synthesis,” in
Newtonian Studies
.

10
. One of the observers, William Whiston, said he made enough money from eclipse lectures and “the sale of my schemes before and after” to support his family for a year, and added: “There happened to be a Mahometan envoy here from Tripoly, who at first thought we were distracted, by pretending to know so very punctually when God Almighty would totally eclipse the Sun; which his own musselmen were not able to do.… When the eclipse came exactly as we foretold, he was asked again, what he thought of the matter now? His answer was, that he supposed we knew this by art magick.”
Memoirs
, p. 205.

11
. George Gordon (London: W.W., 1719).

12
. Not till 1890, if we believe the
OED
, and its first appearance was pejorative: “1890
Athenæum
19 July 92/2 [Mercier] declared Newtonianism to be the ‘most absurd scientific extravagance that has ever issued from the human imagination.’ ”

13
.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies
(London: E. Cave, 1739), p. 231.

14
. Socolow, “Of Newton and the Apple,”
Laughing at Gravity
, p. 7.

15
. Haydon’s
Autobiography
(1853), quoted in Nicolson,
Newton Demands the Muse
, p. 1; and Penelope Hughes-Hallett,
The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London, 1817
(London: Viking, 2000).

16
. Keats,
Lamia
(1819).

17
. Shelley,
Queen Mab
, V: 143–45. He read Newton carefully and with understanding. “We see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers: we merely know their effects; we are in a state of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes. These Newton calls the phenomena of things; but the pride of philosophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes.”
Notes to Queen Mab
, VII.

18
. Wordsworth,
The Prelude
, III.

19
. Blake,
The Book of Urizen
, I.

20
. Blake, “Annotations to the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds.”

21
. Blake, “On the Virginity of the Virgin Mary & Johanna Southcott” (
Satiric Verses & Epigrams
). Also: “To teach doubt & Experiment / Certainly was not what Christ meant.”
The Everlasting Gospel
.

22
. Blake,
Jerusalem
, Chapter I.

23
. Brewster,
Life of Sir Isaac Newton
, p. 271.

24
. Byron,
Don Juan
, Canto X.

25
. Burtt,
Metaphysical Foundations
, pp. 203, 303.

26
.
Principia
(Motte), p. 192.

27
. As Clifford Truesdell puts it (“Reactions of Late Baroque Mechanics to Success, Conjecture, Error, and Failure in Newton’s
Principia
,” in Palter,
Annus Mirabilis
, p. 192): “Newton relinquished the diplomatic immunity granted to nonmathematical philosophers, chemists, psychologists, etc., and entered into the area where an error is an error even if it is Newton’s error; in fact, all the more so because it is Newton’s error.”