tion. It is hardly polite to offer to a Prince such a piece of slip-slop as "it is from the trenches of science alone that war can be successfully waged."

Passing by this little mistake, however, let us come to the life itself.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, in the manor-house of Woolsthorpe, near the village of Colsterthorpe, six miles south of Grantham. His father died before he was born, and he himself seems to have come prematurely into the world, and was scarcely expected to survive in it. The little manor* which belonged to his father had a rental of only £30 per annum, and his mother, whose name was Ayscough, had another little estate close by, of about £50 per annum. Before he was four years old, his mother was married again to the Rev. Barnabas Smith, rector of North Witham. At the age of twelve he went to the Free-School at Grantham, where he was at first very inattentive, and very low in the school, until having fought with and beaten a boy who stood above him in the class, he was induced to try whether he could not master him there also. His faculties, which had probably hitherto been preoccupied with his own thoughts rather than dormant, thus once roused and set in action, he soon not only rose ahead of his particular opponent, but of all the rest of the school.

Mechanical inventions seem at this time to have been his principal taste. He made a working model of a wind. mill that was being erected in the neighbourhood. He also constructed a water-clock out of an old box, giving it a dial-plate, on which the index was turned by a piece of wood, that either "fell or rose by water dropping." A mechanical carriage having four wheels, which was moved by a handle or winch wrought by the person who sat in it, is also enumerated among his constructions. Sir David mentions it as a curious fact, that Leibnitz, the rival of Newton, laboured at similar inventions.

It appears that, not satisfied with his water clock, he had constructed another time-measurer, by driving a number of pegs into the walls and roofs of the school buildings, so that their shadows marked the hours; and this was long known and used in the neighbourhood under the name of "Isaac's dial." He also carved two regular sun-dials on the walls of his own house at Woolsthorpe.

In addition to mechanical inventions, he cultivated the arts both of painting and poetry, his room being hung with pictures drawn by himself some copied from prints and others from life. No authentic specimen of his verses, however, has come down to us.

During the seven years he spent at school at Grantham, he appears to have fallen in love with a Miss Storey, and had he had the means in early life, it is probable that he would afterwards have married her. He retained a great esteem for her in subsequent years, even after her second marriage, and assisted both her and her family in some pecuniary embarrassments.

In 1656 his stepfather, the Rev. B. Smith, died, and his mother returned to Woolsthorpe, bringing with her a half-brother and two half-sisters to Newton. He was then, at the age of fifteen, taken from school, and set to cultivate the farm, and sell the produce at the market. This employment did not at all suit his disposition, as may be supposed, and it was shortly decided, by the advice of his uncle, the Rev. W. Ayscough, that he should be prepared to enter the University of Cambridge. He returned, therefore, to school, where he remained till his nineteenth year. Some vision of his future fame seems to have passed before the eyes of his old schoolmaster, as we may gather from the following pas

sage:

"The day in which he quitted Grantham was one of much interest not only to himself but to his school-fellows and his venerable

teacher. Mr. Conduit has recorded it as a tradition in Grantham, that on that day the good old man, with the pride of a father, placed his favourite pupil in the most conspicuous part of the school, and having, with tears in his eyes, made a speech in praise of his character and talents, held him up to the scholars as a proper object of their love and imitation. We have not heard that the schoolmaster of Grantham lived long enough to feel a just pride in the transcendent reputation of his pupil; but many of the youth to whom his affectionate counsel was addressed, may have had frequent opportunities of glorying in having been the school-fellows of Sir Isaac Newton."-Vol. I. p. 18.

He was admitted as a sub-sizar at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the 5th of June, 1661, and matriculated sizar on the 8th of July. We have little record of Newton's undergraduate life at Cambridge, but the following passage is an interesting one:

"Before Newton left Woolsthorpe, his uncle had given him a copy of Sanderson's Logic, which he seems to have studied so thoroughly, that when he afterwards attended the lectures on that work, he found that he knew more of it than his tutor. Finding him so far advanced, his tutor intimated to him that he was about to read Kepler's Optics to some Gentleman Commoners, and that he might attend the Readings if he pleased. Newton immediately studied the book at home, and when his tutor gave him notice that his Lectures upon it were to commence, he was surprised to learn that it had been already mastered by his pupil.

"About the same time probably he bought a book on Judicial Astrology at Stourbridge fair, and in the course of perusing it he came to a figure of the Heavens, which he could not understand without a previous knowledge of trigonometry. He therefore purchased an English Euclid, with an index of all the problems at the end of it, and having turned to two or three which he thought likely to remove his difficulties, he found the truths which they enunciated so self-evident, that he expressed his astonishment that any person should have taken the trouble of writing a demonstration of them. He therefore threw aside Euclid as a trifling book,' and set himself to the study of Descartes' Geometry, where problems not so simple seem to have baffled his ingenuity. Even after reading a few pages, he got beyond his depth, and laid aside the work; and he is said to have resumed it again and again, alternately retreating and advancing, till he was master of the whole, without having received any assistance. The neglect which he had shown of the elementary truths of geometry he afterwards regarded

as a mistake in his mathematical studies; and on a future occasion he expressed to Dr. Pemberton his regret that he had applied himself to the works of Descartes, and other algebraic writers, before he had considered the Elements of Euclid with that attention which so excellent a writer deserved.'

"The study of Descartes' geometry seems to have inspired Newton with a love of the subject, and to have introduced him to the higher mathematics. In a small commonplace book, bearing on the 7th page the date of Jan. 1663-4, there are several articles on angular ɛections, and the squaring of curves and crooked lines that may be squared,' several calculations about musical notes;-geometrical propositions from Francis Vieta and Schooten; annotations out of Wallis's Arithmetic of Infinites, together with observations on Refraction,-on the grinding of spherical optic glasses,'-on the errors of lenses, and the method of rectifying them, and on the extraction of all kinds of roots, particularly those 'in affected powers.'"Vol. I. pp. 21-23.

Sir David gives us the following account of the well-known story of the falling of the apple:

"It was doubtless in the same remarkable year 1666, or perhaps in the autumn of 1665, that Newton's mind was first directed to the subject of Gravity. He appears to have left Cambridge some time before the 8th of August, 1665, when the College was 'dismissed' on account of the Plague, and it was therefore in the autumn of that year, and not in that of 1666, that the apple is said to have fallen from the tree at Woolsthorpe, and suggested to Newton the idea of gravity. When sitting alone in the garden, and speculating on the power of gravity, it occurred to him that as the same power by which the apple fell to the ground, was not sensibly diminished at the greatest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can reach, neither at the summits of the loftiest spires, nor on the tops of the highest mountains, it might extend to the moon and retain her in her orbit, in the same manner as it bends into a curve a stone or a cannon ball, when projected in a straight line from the surface of the earth. If the moon was thus kept in her orbit by gravitation to the earth, or, in other words, its attraction, it was equally probable, he thought, that the planets were kept in their orbits by gravitating towards the sun. Kepler had discovered the great law of the planetary motions, that the squares of their periodic times were as the cubes of their distances from the sun, and hence Newton drew the important conclusion that the force of gravity or attraction, by which the planets were retained in their orbits, varied as the square of their distances from the sun. Knowing

the force of gravity at the earth's surface, he was, therefore, led to compare it with the force exhibited in the actual motion of the moon, in a circular orbit; but having assumed that the distance of the moon from the earth was equal to sixty of the earth's semidiameters, he found that the force by which the moon was drawn from its rectilineal path in a second of time was only 13.9 feet, whereas at the surface of the earth it was 16.1 in a second. This great discrepancy between his theory and what he then considered to be the fact, induced him to abandon the subject, and pursue other studies with which he had been previously occupied." Vol. I. pp. 25-27.

On the disappearance of the plague, he returned to Cambridge, and was elected Fellow of Trinity on the 1st of October, 1667, taking his Master of Arts degree on the 16th of March, 1668. He was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics on the 29th of October, 1669. These are the most important external events of this period of Newton's life. The real life of Newton, however, was within. events of greatest importance, of greatest interest, and greatest value to the world, were the thoughts, the reflections, and the discoveries of his mind, events the date of which he only could be conscious of, and which, in few instances, he would trouble himself to recollect or record.

The

The first great subject of investigation and discovery on which the mind of Newton employed itself, was the nature of light. It seems appropriate enough, that he who was to throw so vast and so steady a light upon the constitution of the universe, should first teach us what that light itself was, by the action of which upon our senses we could alone become conscious of the existence of the bodies of which

the universe is composed. In our days, when the nature of light and colour is more or less familiar to us all, it is difficult even in imagination to throw ourselves back into the condition of mind of even the profoundest philosophers of former times, to whom this matter was unknown. It is only by reading, and attempting to understand the laboured and complicated dissertations of former philosophers, that we are able to form an adequate appreciation of the clearness, and truth, and beauty of Newton's explanations. All previous authors, except Isaac Vossius, and he only by guess,

supposed colour not to be innate in light, but produced by the action of the bodies which reflect or refract it; whereas Newton proved that "the modification of light from which colours take their origin is innate in light itself, and arises neither from reflection nor refraction, nor from the qualities or any other conditions of bodies whatever, and that it cannot be destroyed or in any way changed by them."

Sir David Brewster twice mentions Stourbridge Fair in connexion with Newton. In the first instance, a book bought there set him to study trigonometry, and, in the second, a prism there procured induced him to experiment on light, and thus commence his discoveries in optics. To a Cambridge man of the present day, there is something remarkably whimsical in these associations, for though it was doubtless formerly a great commercial fair, its present reputation is of rather a dubious kind. It would sound rather odd to a Dublin man to be told that some of the profounder studies of the Fellows of our own Trinity College took their origin from any investigation, made in consequence of a visit to Donnybrook :

"After our author had purchased his glass prism at Stourbridge Fair, he made use of it in the following manner. Having made a hole in his window-shutter, and darkened the room, he admitted a ray of the sun's light, which after refraction at the two surfaces of the prism, exhibited on the opposite wall what is called the Solar or Prismatic Spectrum. This spectrum was an elongated image of the sun about five times as long as it was broad, and consisted of seven different colours, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. 'It was at first,' says Newton, a very pleasing divertisement to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but this pleasure was immediately succeeded by surprise at various phenomena which were inconsistent with the received laws of refraction. The 'extravagant disproportion between the length of the spectrum and its breadth,' excited him to a more than ordinary curiosity of examining from whence it might proceed. He could scarcely think that the various thickness of the glass, or the termination with shadow or darkness could have any influence on light to produce such an effect; yet he thought it not amiss first to examine these circumstances, and he therefore tried what would happen by transmitting light through parts of the glass of different thickness, or through holes in the window of different sizes, or by setting the

prism without, so that the light might pass through it and be refracted before it was terminated by the hole; but he found none of these circumstances material. The fashion of the colours was in all these cases the

same.

"Newton then suspected that by some unevenness of the glass, or other accidental irregularity, the colours might be thus dilated. In order to try this he took another prism, and placed it in such a manner that the light passing through them both might be refracted contrariwise, and thus returned into the path from which the first prism had diverted it, for by this means he thought that the regular effects of the first prism would be destroyed by the second prism, and the irregular ones more augmented by the multiplicity of refractions. The result was, that the light which by the first prism was diffused into an oblong form was reduced by the second prism into a circular one with as much regularity as when it did not pass through them, so that whatever was the cause of the length of the image it did not arise from any irregularity in the prism."— Vol. I. pp. 39-41.

After trying many experiments, he at length arrived at the grand conclusion, that the greater length of the spectrum was caused by the fact, that light was not homogeneous, but that white light consisted of many variouslycoloured rays of different refrangibility, the red rays being least bent out of their straight course in passing through the prism, while the violet were most bent, or refracted, the intermediate colours taking their places, according to their intermediate degrees of flexure.

Such is a simple account of those remarkable experiments and observations which have been fruitful in results up to the present day, and the whole benefit of which we have, in all probability, not yet received.

They led directly to the construction of reflecting telescopes, of which one, constructed by Newton, is now in possession of the Royal Society, and they led, after an interval of eighty or ninety years, to the improvement of refracting telescopes, by the perseverance of Mr. Dollond.

The small reflecting telescope of Newton was followed, after an interval of fifty years, by the larger ones of Mr. Hadley, the first of which was six feet long, and magnified 200 times.

These again were succeeded, in another half century, by those of Sir William Herschel, the largest and most celebrated of which was forty feet long

and five wide. After the lapse of yet another fifty years, Ireland has had the honour of still further perfecting these instruments, through the labours of her noble son, Lord Rosse, who has since worthily occupied Newton's chair as President of the Royal Society of London. Sir David gives woodcuts and descriptions of the magnificent instrument at Parsonstown, which has a speculum six feet in diameter, having an area of surface more than double that of Herschel's, and a focal distance, and consequently a tube, of fifty feet in length.

We have no space to follow Sir David through the history of Newton's subsequent experiments and discoveries in light and colours, and the objections to his theory, and attacks which were made upon him, in consequence of their publication. The controversies in which Newton thus found himself involved were eminently dis tasteful to him. So much was this the case, that he had at one time resolved never to publish anything new again; and this was one reason, probably, why he allowed his mathematical discoveries on the subject of "fluxions" to lie by him for twenty or thirty years, without any formal publication. If so, the precaution eminently defeated its intended end, as this retention was productive of one of the bitterest contests, in which he was compelled to engage in after life, with his great but disingenuous rival, Leibnitz.

In his letters, about this time, we meet with the following passages :

"I was so persecuted with discussions arising out of my theory of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet, to run after a shadow."

"I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy; but if I get free of Mr. Linus's business, I will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally, excepting what I do for my private satisfaction, or leave to come out after me; for I see a man must resolve to put out nothing new, or become a slave to defend it."

Controversy is in itself painful enough, unless scrupulously divested

of all feeling of personal enmity, and of all desire for individual superiority. He who, in matters of science, fights solely for victory, should be left to beat the air, and tire himself with his own efforts. He who makes an attack, with the desire of wounding, or injuring, or annoying any man, should be repressed by the common voice of society as a common nuisance- without much regard to the good or bad foundation on which his attack is based. Such men, however acute in intellect, are generally small and contracted in moral and social views, and mean and petty in disposition. Still, controversy between principals, however annoying to one or other of the parties, is sometimes inevitable. Were it confined to the principals, however, it would probably die out in almost all cases, if it did not issue in amicable relations. But when controversy becomes public, it almost invariably happens that one or both of the disputants is surrounded by a number of men, greatly inferior to either, who join as partisans in the battle. This pack of yelping puppies create excitement by their clamour, and heat by their busy motion. They carry tales, distortions, misrepresentations, and magnifications of the truth, or pure, unadulterated lies and inventions, rumours and reports made current by their endorsement, to the ears of the principal parties engaged, until each is led to believe the other a scoundrel, only deserving of bad treatment.

Traces of this action can be detected throughout the controversies in which Newton became so reluctantly engaged, although we would be far from designating, by the terms just used, many of the partisans of Newton and his opponents. Still no man's judgment or fairness is to be trusted when once he becomes a partisan; and it is one of the most evil effects of controversy, that the best and most genial natures are apt to become corrupted and embittered, the most honest and impartial minds warped and biassed, by its action.

It was in consequence of his reflecting telescope that Newton became known to the Royal Society, and was elected a fellow of that body on January 11, 1672. He soon afterwards communicated to them his optical discoveries.

Sir David Brewster takes advantage

of his finding among Newton's papers a curious" Scheme for establishing the Royal Society," to bring forward his own views on a very interesting subject.

This scheme proposes that there should be five committees, each consisting of two or three paid members, who shall be obliged to attend each of the meetings. He would have these committees to consist of members skilled in

1. Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Mechanics, &c.

2. Philosophy relating to the Heavens, the Atmosphere, and the Surface of the Earth, viz.-Optics, Astronomy, Geography, Navigation, and Meteorology.

3. Philosophy relating to Animals. 4. Philosophy relating to Vegetables.

5. Mineralogy, Chemistry, &c., and the Causes of Subterraneous Caves, Rocks, Shells, Waters, Petrifactions, Exhalations, Damps, Heats, Fires, and Earthquakes, and the Rising and Falling of Mountains and Islands; in fact, what we should now call Geology.

To these committees he would refer all books, letters, &c., on their several subjects, and would have vacancies in these paid fellowships filled up by election from the main body.

On this subject, Sir David has the following passage:—

"It is very evident, from this interesting document, that Newton was desirous of converting the Royal Society into an institution like that of the Academy of Sciences in Paris; but we have not been able to learn that he ever communicated this plan either to the Society itself, or to any of its members. During the last twenty years, and long before we could have known the views of so competent a judge, we have cherished the same desire, and embraced every opportunity of pressing it upon the notice of the public. Several years ago we communicated Sir Isaac Newton's scheme to Sir Robert Peel, and it was so far carried into effect by the establishment of the Museum of Practical Geology, which is neither more nor less than an enlargement of the Mineralogical, Geological, and Chemical sections of an Academy of Sciences, or a national Institute. The services of all the members of this important body are of course at the entire disposal of the state, though its members are frequently employed in other duties than those which strictly belong to their office. If mineralogy, geology, and chemistry, therefore, have obtained a national establishment