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Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy
Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology
Jed Z. Buchwald, general editor, Evelyn Simha, governor

Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen, editors, Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy

Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, editors, Natural Particulars: Nature and the
Disciplines in Renaissance Europe

Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor H. Levere, editors, Instruments and Experimentation in

the History of Chemistry

Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes, editors, Systems, Experts, and Computers:
The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After

N. M. Swerdlow, editor, Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination

Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy

edited by Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
( 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Bembo on ‘3B2’ by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong and printed
in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy / edited by Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen.
p. cm. — (Dibner Institute studies in the history of science and technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-02477-2 (hc: alk. paper)
1. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642–1727. 2. Science—England—History—17th century.
I. Buchwald, Jed Z. II. Cohen, I. Bernard, 1914– III. Series.
Q143.N495.I73 2000
509.42 0 09 0 032—dc21 99-042985
 Contents

Introduction vii
I. Bernard Cohen and Jed Z. Buchwald

Contributors xix

I M O T IV ATIO NS A N D M ETHODS 1

1 To Twist the Meaning: Newton’s Regulae

Philosophandi Revisited 3
Maurizio Mamiani

2 The Case of the Missing Author: The Title Page of

Newton’s Opticks (1704), with Notes on the Title
Page of Huygens’s Traité de la lumière 15
I. Bernard Cohen

3 Newton’s Experiments on Diffraction and the

Delayed Publication of the Opticks 47
Alan E. Shapiro

4 Mathematicians and Naturalists: Sir Isaac Newton

and the Royal Society 77
Mordechai Feingold

II C ELESTIAL D YNAMICS AND R ATIONAL

M ECHANICS 103

5 Newton’s Mature Dynamics: A Crooked Path Made

Straight 105
J. Bruce Brackenridge

6 Newton on the Moon’s Variation and Apsidal

Motion: The Need for a Newer ‘‘New
Analysis’’ 139
Curtis Wilson
Contents vi

7 Newton’s Perturbation Methods for the

Three-Body Problem and Their Application to
Lunar Motion 189
Michael Nauenberg

8 Force, Continuity, and the Mathematization of

Motion at the End of the Seventeenth
Century 225
Michel Blay

9 The Newtonian Style in Book II of the

Principia 249
George E. Smith

Appendix: Newton on Fluid Resistance in the First

Edition: English Translations of the Passages
Replaced or Removed in the Second and Third
Editions 299
Translated by I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman, Julia Budenz,
and George E. Smith

A PPENDIX 315

Some Recollections of Richard Samuel Westfall

(1924 – 1996) 317
I. Bernard Cohen

The Background to the Mathematization of

Nature 321
Richard S. Westfall

Index 341
 Introduction

In the last century, and especially in the last half century, our views con-
cerning Isaac Newton have undergone radical changes. Today, we have a
deeper understanding of Newton’s science and mathematics, and we have
become aware of his full creative stature and the many dimensions of his
complex personality. The present volume displays some of these recent
changes in our understanding of Newton’s scientific thought, the results
of new analyses of manuscripts and printed documents.
A convenient place to begin examining changes in Newton scholar-
ship is the two-volume biography by David Brewster, published in 1855.
At that time, the fashion was to write of historic personages in an adula-
tory mode. Brewster thus calls Newton the ‘‘High Priest of Science.’’1
Brewster’s biography is notorious as well for the treatment of Newton’s
alchemy and his religious beliefs. Brewster summed up his discussion of
Newton’s alchemy by saying that he simply could not ‘‘understand how
a mind of such power, and so nobly occupied with the abstractions of
geometry, and the study of the material world, could stoop to be even the
copyist of the most contemptible alchemical poetry.’’ Although he pub-
lished some extracts from Newton’s unfinished theological writings, he
either did not see or purposely ignored Newton’s statements of his uni-
tarian beliefs.
In retrospect, what is most disappointing about Brewster’s biography,
however, is not the attitude toward alchemy and religion, but rather the
failure to illuminate our understanding of Newton’s actual science and
mathematics. The two volumes are notable for the absence of mathematical
equations or illuminating discussion of Newton’s physical science. Thus in
today’s world, this work is not very useful to scholars and pales by com-
parison with the meticulously edited and copiously annotated edition of
the Newton-Cotes correspondence, produced by J. Edleston, as useful and
important a tool for Newton scholars today as when first published in 1850.
One of the positive features of Brewster’s two volumes is that they
did make available some selections from the manuscripts belonging to the
I. Bernard Cohen and Jed Z. Buchwald viii

family of the Earl of Portsmouth, Newton’s collateral descendants.2 Until

the latter part of the nineteenth century, the greatest collection of manu-
scripts by or relating to Newton was still in their possession. These con-
sisted of Newton’s own records of correspondence (letters both to and
from Newton), drafts of major and minor works, and various kinds of
essays on many di¤erent subjects, together with the documents assembled
by John Conduitt for a planned biography of Newton (Conduitt was the
husband of Newton’s niece). These papers were inherited by the Con-
duitts’ only child, who married Viscount Lymington, whose son was the
second Earl of Portsmouth. This collection, generally known as the
‘‘Portsmouth Papers,’’ was kept in Hurstbourne Castle until the Earl and
his family decided that Newton’s scientific manuscripts would be better
preserved in some public repository. Accordingly, in the 1870s, what was
called the ‘‘scientific portion’’ of the manuscripts was deposited in the
Cambridge University Library.3
Over the next decades, this extraordinary hoard of Newtoniana
attracted little scholarly attention and was hardly used. One of the few
who even deigned to look at any of these manuscripts was W. W. Rouse
Ball, known today chiefly for his popular book on ‘‘mathematical recre-
ations.’’4 His books, however, did not make the world cognizant of the
great treasures awaiting study in the library.
Between the time of the gift of the Portsmouth Papers and the
1930s, a few others did make some use of this vast collection, although
the work of these scholars did not declare to the world at large the im-
portance of studying Newton in the original sources. In trying to under-
stand why this was so, we must remember that in those decades there was
as yet no real discipline of the history of science and of mathematics. The
number of individuals producing lasting historical contributions in the his-
tory of science and mathematics was small, including such heroic figures as
J. L. Heiberg, G. Eneström, Thomas Little Heath, and Paul Tannery.
In 1934, Louis Trenchard More, Dean of the Graduate School of
the University of Cincinnati, published a 675-page biography of Newton.
Even though More did make some use of manuscript sources, quoting or
citing many hitherto unnoticed documents from the Portsmouth Papers
(both those in Cambridge and those still remaining in the possession of
the family), his book did not spark a new interest in Newton—either in
the personality of this extraordinary man or in his scientific work. One
reason for this was More’s failure to produce a deep analysis of Newton’s
mathematics and physics, as demonstrated by the absence of equations and
diagrams in this massive biography.5
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Introduction ix

As all Newton scholars are aware, the sale at public auction at

Sotheby’s in 1936 of the vast horde of Newton papers still belonging to
the family of the Earl of Portsmouth (provoked by the need to satisfy the
payment of death duties) changed the availability of Newtonian sources
almost overnight. The sale dispersed Newton’s papers to the far corners of
the earth. A notable scholarly catalogue was produced for it, containing
many generous extracts from documents hitherto unknown or inaccessi-
ble to scholars. The descriptions of the various manuscripts and other
items put up for auction, together with copious extracts, revealed more
about Isaac Newton as a person and about various aspects of the devel-
opment of his scientific thought than More’s biography of a few years
earlier. Prior to the late 1940s, however, the only publication in which
these newly available manuscripts were used was a curious paper by John
Maynard Keynes. Keynes had assembled a considerable mass of the
Newton papers disseminated in the Sotheby sale; these are now in King’s
College Library. In particular, Keynes owned a number of manuscripts
dealing with alchemy and with theological subjects.
On the basis of an examination of these manuscripts, Keynes pro-
duced a paper, first read to a group at Trinity College and later to the
Royal Society Club. Keynes was no longer living when in 1946 the
Royal Society somewhat belatedly celebrated the 300th anniversary of
the birth of Isaac Newton. Keynes’s brother Geo¤rey—surgeon, biblio-
phile, and book collector—read this paper at the celebratory meetings,
and it was published in the Royal Society’s volume. Entitled ‘‘Newton the
Man,’’ this essay has become famous for its radical portrayal of Newton.
Keynes insisted that his reading of Newton’s manuscripts revealed a
Newton who was not ‘‘the first and greatest of the modern age of scien-
tists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and
untinctured reason.’’ Rather than being ‘‘the first of the age of reason,’’
Keynes presented Newton as ‘‘the last of the magicians,’’ the ‘‘last won-
der-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.’’
In short, Keynes denigrated Newton’s mathematics and physics and his
founding of celestial dynamics, denying that he had been ‘‘the first and
greatest of the modern age of scientists.’’ The new Newton was to be
considered ‘‘a magician’’ who ‘‘looked on the whole universe and all that
is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought
to . . . certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a
sort of philosophers’ treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.’’6
The next works to be based on the Newton manuscripts were a pair
of scholarly articles published by Rupert Hall in 1948 and 1957. The first
I. Bernard Cohen and Jed Z. Buchwald x

of these dealt with one of Newton’s early notebooks; the second,

‘‘Newton on Central Forces,’’ used manuscript sources to explore the
genesis and development of Newton’s concepts in dynamics. Despite the
fact that Hall had shown how studying the manuscripts in the Cambridge
University Library could yield insights into the development of Newton’s
scientific thought, others did not follow his example at once. Indeed, not
until 1962, when Rupert and Marie Hall published Unpublished Scientific
Papers of Isaac Newton, did the scholarly world at large, the world of his-
torians of science and of scientists and mathematicians interested in his-
torical questions, become aware of some of the extraordinary insights to
be found by examining the unpublished Newton materials.
The seminal importance of the Halls’ work can best be illustrated by
a few examples of the ways in which it changed our general thinking
about Newton’s scientific ideas. Of course, the primary significance of this
work is that Rupert and Marie Hall actually found, identified, and inter-
preted a large number of documents, the very existence of which was
then not generally known, and explained through interpretive essays and
commentaries the significance of the new documents they had found and
were presenting.
One of the most notable of these documents is Newton’s essay
beginning ‘‘De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum.’’ The Halls recog-
nized its significance as Newton’s response to a first contact with Descartes’s
Principia. Here we find Newton formulating major concepts concerning
space, time, and motion, and also force and inertia, in a Cartesian frame-
work, just as he did for his mathematics. The publication of this essay,
together with the Halls’ introductory commentary, documented Newton’s
first full encounter with the philosophy of Descartes and wholly changed
our idea concerning Descartes’s influence on Newton.7
A second important contribution of Unpublished Scientific Papers was
the publication of a set of documents relating to Newton’s early thoughts
about motion. These include the first English translation made of the tract
De Motu. Although this tract had been published at least twice before, in
the original Latin, the Halls not only gave the first English translation but
also listed the various extant versions and included extracts indicating the
di¤erences among them. Thus for the first time, this earnest of the great
Principia to come was made available in a form for scholars’ general use.
A third revelation of Unpublished Scientific Papers—in some sense the
most important of all—was the existence of preliminary versions of an
introduction and conclusion planned for the first edition of the Principia,
including some thoughts that finally appeared in the second edition of the
Introduction xi

Principia in the concluding General Scholium and in later Queries of the

Opticks. The Halls also found documentary fragments relating to these
rejected texts. Thus they solved a long-standing scholarly puzzle: why did
the first Principia end abruptly in a discussion of comets? How could
Newton have written so magisterial a work on natural philosophy with-
out a proper conclusion? The Halls found the answer. He had planned a
general conclusion in which he would indicate, inter alia, how his find-
ings might be extended into other domains of natural philosophy, sug-
gesting how his work in rational mechanics and celestial dynamics might
be carried into studies of the constitution of matter and of the action of
short-range forces between its constituent elements. In retrospect, we can
understand why Newton decided not to burden his Principia with debat-
able and intimate speculations on such points. There were enough topics
in that work that were bound to arouse hostility, such as the introduction
of a gravitating force ‘‘acting at a distance,’’ a concept abhorrent to all
scientists who were followers of the reigning ‘‘mechanical philosophy.’’
The Halls solved another long-standing puzzle about the Principia.
In the eventual General Scholium, which appeared for the first time in the
second edition of the Principia (1713), a final paragraph discusses what
Newton calls a ‘‘spiritus,’’ or spirit. What did he mean? No one was quite
sure. It had even been proposed that Newton may have had in mind the
‘‘spirit of God.’’ The Halls discovered some preliminary drafts, which they
published for the first time, that suggested that the ‘‘spirit’’ that Newton
had in mind was an aspect of the new science of electricity then being
developed by Francis Hauksbee, whose relations with Newton were later
the subject of several important studies by the late Henry Guerlac.8
An important use of Newton’s manuscripts and other writings was
made by Alexandre Koyré, whose seminal Newtonian Studies was published
in 1965. At about the same time, J. E. McGuire used manuscript sources to
reveal a di¤erent Newton from the one we were accustomed to think of.
By 1962, several other scholars had begun projects based on the use
of Newton manuscripts. The Royal Society had undertaken the edition of
the Correspondence of Isaac Newton, the first volume of which appeared
in 1959, three years before Unpublished Scientific Papers. I. B. Cohen had
begun, in close collaboration with Alexandre Koyré, to study Newton’s
manuscripts and annotated books in order to learn about the genesis and
development of the concepts and methods of his great Principia, eventually
leading to their edition of the Principia, which included variant readings.
Others, notably John Herivel (in 1959), had begun to publish the results
of explorations in the Newton manuscripts.9 Even more important was
I. Bernard Cohen and Jed Z. Buchwald xii

the enterprise of D. T. Whiteside, eventually resulting in the eight mag-

nificent volumes of the Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (the first of
which appeared in 1967).
It is di‰cult to think of any work of scholarship produced in our
time of comparable magnitude to Whiteside’s Mathematical Papers. Not
only do we find here in full display the documents that mark the devel-
opment of Newton’s thinking in mathematics, but there are also extensive
annotations and commentaries that provide more information concerning
the development of the exact sciences in the seventeenth century than is
available in most treatises.
The eight volumes of Mathematical Papers are remarkable in many
di¤erent ways, not least because they resulted from the scholarly activity
of a single individual. Whiteside not only discovered or identified a vast
quantity of documents, but his presentation of them (in the original Latin,
often accompanied by English versions) is graced with an illuminating
commentary. Whiteside provides not only interpretive glosses on the
texts he has edited but also a running historical commentary that is with-
out any doubt the most extensive and important historical presentation
of seventeenth-century mathematics produced in our times. Whiteside’s
extraordinary project involved identification of documents, the recogni-
tion that certain fragments in di¤erent parts of the manuscript collection
belonged together, and the ability to date Newton’s manuscripts on the
basis of changes in handwriting.
Among Whiteside’s most dramatic findings is the importance of
Descartes in the early formulation of Newton’s mathematics. Before the
edition of Mathematical Papers, our knowledge of this subject was based on
what seemed to be irrefutable evidence of Newton’s disdain for Descartes.
There was the statement recorded by Pemberton that Newton regretted
having begun his study of mathematics by reading the moderns rather than
the ancients. This was interpreted as indicating his regret at wasting time
with Descartes’s Géométrie rather than studying Euclid and Apollonius. The
second was the statement by Brewster that Newton’s copy of Descartes’s
Géométrie was marked throughout ‘‘Error. Error. Non Geom.’’ For some
time it was thought that Brewster might have been exaggerating, since
there seemed to be no such copy in existence. But finally—indeed, in part
as a result of Whiteside’s astuteness—this puzzle was resolved. Newton did
make such marks in a copy of Descartes. When such evidence concerning
Newton’s attitude toward Descartes was coupled with the conclusion of
Book II of the Principia, the implication seemed certain: Descartes was not
one of those who had exerted a formative influence on Newton.
Introduction xiii

Whiteside changed that view entirely insofar as mathematics is con-

cerned. He showed how Newton’s early views of the calculus were forged
while making a close study of Descartes’s Géométrie—not the edition in
French in which he gleefully noted the errors, but the edition in Latin
with the commentaries of Frans van Schooten and others. This introduced
Newton not only to the mathematical concepts and methods of Descartes
himself, but also to the important innovations of the Dutch school, who
were van Schooten’s pupils, notably Hudde and Huygens.
The revelation of this seminal role of Descartes, enriched by van
Schooten, was paralleled by Alexandre Koyré’s recognition, at more or
less the same time, of the ways in which Newton’s reading of Descartes
conditioned some of his concepts concerning motion. Koyré showed us
how Newton took from Descartes the concept of ‘‘state’’ of motion or of
rest and developed Descartes’s ideas in his own formulation of Definition
3 and Law 1. Today, we are aware that the ‘‘axiomata sive leges motus’’ of
Newton’s Principia were a kind of transformation of what Descartes called
‘‘regulae quaedam sive leges naturae’’ in his Principia.
Whiteside made a second revelation in his gloss on Proposition 41
of Book I of the Principia. Until recently, most scholars had limited their
study of the Principia to the definitions and laws and then the first three
sections of Book I. They skipped all the rest of Book I and also the whole
of Book II, finally studying the first part of Book III and the concluding
General Scholium. This was in fact Newton’s own suggestion to readers
in the beginning of Book III.
Today, however, it is becoming generally recognized that we don’t
begin to see Newton as the master of mathematical physical science until
farther along in Book I. Here we needed someone like Whiteside to guide
us, to make clear, at the start, the exact nature of Newton’s dependence
on what he called ‘‘the quadrature of certain curves,’’ or the ability to
perform the integration of certain functions. Even more important,
Whiteside’s guidance made it evident that in Proposition 41, as elsewhere,
Newton was in fact using the calculus: that his very language, when read
carefully, permits no other reading. For example, when Newton writes
about ‘‘the line element IK’’ that is ‘‘described in a given minimally small
time,’’ he clearly has in mind what we would call a distance ds described
in a time dt. In short, the cluster of propositions around Proposition 41 are
written in the language of the di¤erential and integral calculus; their ana-
lytic character is masked only partially by their synthetic form of expression.
Among more recent scholarship, special notice should be taken of
the magnificent biography of Newton by the late R. S. Westfall (1980).
I. Bernard Cohen and Jed Z. Buchwald xiv

This work, Never at Rest, based on an extensive study of Newton’s

manuscripts, does not merely chronicle the events in Newton’s life but
illuminates almost every aspect of Newton’s life and thought, providing
a rich and valuable commentary on Newton’s scientific achievement.
Another project certain to assume an important place in the treasury of
scholarly editions based on manuscript sources is the edition of Newton’s
papers on optics, edited by Alan Shapiro, an earnest of which appeared
as volume 1 in 1984. In the past decade, monographs by Michel Blay,
Bruce Brackenridge, S. Chandrasekhar, François de Gandt, Dana Dens-
more, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, Herman Ehrlichson, Niccolò Guicciardini,
Michael Nauenberg, George Smith, and Curtis Wilson—to name but a
few—have enriched the scholarly study of Newton’s science.
Recent Newton scholarship has illuminated not only his work in
mathematics and the exact and experimental physical sciences but the full
scope of his work, his public and private life, and his personality. This
scholarship has cast light, for example, on his philosophical and religious
beliefs, notably his ideas concerning theology, prophecy, biblical history
and the interpretation of Scripture, and a tradition of ancient knowledge.
There have also been important studies of Newton’s alchemy and his
general philosophy of nature, including his views on ‘‘matter’’ and ‘‘spirit’’
and their relation to the operations of nature. Newton’s ideas concerning
the books of Daniel and Revelation have been studied, as well as his
concern for the issue of prophecy. Researchers are now examining the
links between what we today consider to be Newton’s scientific work and
the general religious and philosophical background of the times in which
he lived.10
The present volume singles out two strands in contemporary New-
tonian studies for special consideration. One of these concentrates on the
intellectual background to Newton’s scientific thought; the other con-
cerns both specific and general aspects of Newton’s technical science. The
contributions to both strands o¤er new, and even startling, claims con-
cerning Newton’s mathematical methods, experimental investigations,
and motivations, as well as the e¤ect that his long presence had on the
pursuit of science in England.
Each of the papers in part I o¤ers, among other riches, a new claim
concerning Newton’s motivations or the sources of his method. Maurizio
Mamiani traces the immensely influential regulae philosophandi, which
achieved final form in the beginning of Book III of the Principia, to an
entirely novel source, namely, a 1618 treatise on logic and rhetoric by
Robert Sanderson that Newton studied while an undergraduate at Cam-
Introduction xv

bridge. I. B. Cohen uses evidence not previously o¤ered concerning

Newton’s reluctance to put his name on his Opticks (1704) to find a
connection between the Opticks and Huygens’s Traité de la Lumière. He
o¤ers other examples in which Newton on more than one occasion did
not put his name on the title page of a work he wrote. Cohen relates this
practice to an ambivalence on Newton’s part to publish the Opticks. New
evidence on this ambivalence is presented by Alan Shapiro, who argues, in
his discussion of Newton’s troubled work on di¤raction, that it was more
Newton’s failure to arrive at a satisfying account of this phenomenon than
his desire to avoid controversy with Robert Hooke that led him to put o¤
until 1704 publication of the Opticks. Mordechai Feingold asserts, among
other things, that antagonistic reactions to Newton’s first publications in
optics derived as much from the stance he took concerning the kind of
knowledge that ought to count as proper (specifically, mathematical
knowledge) as they did from the specific content of Newton’s claims.
Feingold locates Newton’s long withdrawal from public participation in
scientific argument precisely here, arguing that the partisans of mathematics
at the Royal Society, in particular the emerging body of Newtonians,
constituted a sort of rapid deployment force–well organized, eager for
battle, and anxious for hegemonic control–whose legacy included persis-
tent and demoralizing battles over the kinds of natural knowledge worth
pursuing.
Part II consists of five essays that explore Newton’s mathematical
philosophy and his development of rational mechanics and celestial
dynamics. These include detailed examples of Newton’s mechanics in two
apparently di¤erent areas: first, his mathematics for orbital mechanics and
lunar motion, and then his investigations in Book II of the Principia of
motion in resisting media. Bruce Brackenridge argues, in respect to the first
area, that Newton may have used curvature methods quite early in find-
ing the force that acts on a body given its orbit (this being the so-called
direct problem), which underscores a similar claim made by Michael
Nauenberg on the basis of a 1679 letter sent by Newton to Hooke. The
method deployed in the Principia finds the resultant motion by com-
pounding a continuing inertial velocity with an impulsively added one
directed to the center of force, and passing then to the orbital path as a
limit of infinitely many impulses. The curvature method instead decom-
poses the acceleration at a point into components normal and parallel to
the velocity there and then applies Huygens’s measure for acceleration in
a circular path. This earliest method does not provide a simple route to
Kepler’s area law, whereas the Principia’s method does so.
I. Bernard Cohen and Jed Z. Buchwald xvi

Michael Nauenberg’s and Curtis Wilson’s contributions both con-

cern Newton’s treatment of lunar motion. Each discusses a manuscript
in the Portsmouth collection that describes a method for analyzing the
motion of the lunar apse, one that, according to Nauenberg, ‘‘corre-
sponds’’ to the method of variation of orbital parameters developed many
years later by Euler and then completed by Lagrange. Although Wilson
does not agree with Nauenberg’s assertion on this point, both emphasize
the di¤erences between the Portsmouth and Principia approaches to lunar
motions (Newton being concerned in the Principia, however, with mean
rather than apsidal motion). For his part, Nauenberg examines a text he
calls the ‘‘Portsmouth manuscript’’ for di¤erential equations that are
equivalent to ones obtained many years later by Clairaut and d’Alembert.
He finds that Newton was dissatisfied with the method in the Portsmouth
manuscript and compares it to the one he did use in the Principia. Wilson,
on the other hand, argues that the problems Newton faced were con-
nected to the kind of mathematics that he used, because Newton worked
directly with the geometric properties of orbits instead of with successive
approximations to the governing di¤erential equations. According to
Wilson, the major changes in theories of orbital motion that developed
during the eighteenth century were due precisely to the replacement of
geometric by analytic methods. In this regard, Michel Blay’s contribution
provides a specific example of the manner in which analytic methods
were brought to bear early in the eighteenth century on problems in
mechanics. Blay discusses, in particular, Varignon’s deployment of the
methods of Leibnizian calculus, with its specific notion of continuity, in
addressing the problem of central forces, which Newton had treated using
a very di¤erent, impulsive model of action.
Wilson’s and Nauenberg’s contributions provide striking examples
of Newton at work. In them, we see Newton trying to choose appro-
priate procedures for attacking a problem that required adroit approxi-
mations adjusted to the demands of astronomical data. George Smith’s
article concerns a subject that at first appears to be quite di¤erent from this
one, namely, Newton’s account in Book II of the Principia of motion in
resisting media. Yet there are strong methodological links between
Smith’s subject and lunar motion. In both cases Newton worked through
a sequence of approximations, with the evidence from the empirical world
driving the sequence from one idealized situation to the next (although
much depended upon whether the approximations involved geometrical
considerations or ones linked to the governing di¤erential equations
proper). Moreover, we find that the Newton of the Principia is entirely
Introduction xvii

similar to the Newton of the Opticks, for as Shapiro remarks in his con-
tribution, Newton in his analysis of di¤raction ‘‘plays o¤ his measurements
against his mathematical descriptions, which allows him both to change
his measurements and to revise his laws.’’
Finally, Richard S. Westfall explores an aspect of the age of Newton
by examining some of the di¤erent ways in which mathematics came to be
used in pursuits and domains other than theoretical or rational mechanics.
Alas, Westfall died in 1996 and so was unable to make any final revisions
to his chapter. In particular, he had planned to add a note on the use of
mathematics in the analysis of the bills of mortality by John Graunt and on
the work of Sir William Petty on ‘‘political arithmetic,’’ together with
some account of Edmond Halley’s tables of mortality—all indications that
in the age of Newton numerical considerations were being introduced
into new areas of human activity.
All of the chapters in this volume originated in papers that were
presented and discussed at a series of meetings held at the Dibner Institute
for the History of Science and Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The occasion was a symposium to honor the Grace K. Babson Collection
of Newtoniana, formerly housed in the Horne Library of Babson College
and now on permanent deposit in the Burndy Library, which is located
with the Dibner Institute on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The extraordinary resources of the Babson Collection, in
conjunction with the Newton and Newton-related volumes and manu-
scripts in the Burndy Library (originally assembled by Bern Dibner),
constitute one of the most important scholarly resources available for the
study of Isaac Newton’s career and contributions to science as well as the
science that Newton’s work engendered.

Notes

1. Brewster lifted this phrase, ‘‘High Priest of Science,’’ from the eighteenth-century
accounts of Newton written by William Stukeley, an antiquary who had actually
conducted a sort of oral-history interview with Newton.
2. It was long thought that Brewster had based his biography on a complete exami-
nation of these manuscripts, and that he himself had made the selection of those he
published or mentioned. The researches of D. T. Whiteside, however, revealed that
Brewster had not actually had free access to all the Newton papers, but had only
certain selections made for him by a younger son.
3. This enormous collection, rich in all kinds of materials relating to Newton’s life,
his thought, his work in mathematics and physics and astronomy, and much else, was
described in a published catalogue (1888) in which the descriptions are so brief and
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