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That, as we said, is a commonplace; that aspect of Newton's life and achievement has been known and discussed for centuries. More recently, Newton has become the center of a worldwide study of the character of genius. Scholars and stu-372 HOW TO READ A BOOK

dents of science and literature endlessly rank scientists and authors as more or less great, or on a scale ranging from extraordinary to genius. There is a considerable body of learned opinion that maintains that Newton was the supreme geniusthe greatest intellect of all time. Many efforts have been made to characterize and account for genius. Precocity, the ability to concentrate, acute intuitiveness, rigorous analytical capacity

-by terms such as these genius is described. All these terms seem to apply to Isaac Newton.

The biographical sketch of Newton that follows is reprinted from Volume 34 of Great Books of the Westem World.

That volume contains the texts of Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ( often known as Newton's Principia ) and of his Optics; it also contains the text of the Treatise on Light of the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens.

The biography of Newton is somewhat longer than the one of Mill; therefore, take ten to twelve minutes to read it. As before, mark the most striking passages and make notes. Then try to answer the questions that follow.

Sm IsAAc NEWTON

1642-1727

Newton was hom at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Chrisbnas Day, 1642. His father, a small farmer, died a few months before his birth, and when in 1645 his mother married the rector of North Witham, Newton was left with his maternal grandmother at Woolsthorpe. After having acquired the rudiments of education &t small schools close by, Newton was sent at the age of twelve to the grammar school at Grantham, where he lived in the house of an apothecary. By his own account, Newton was at first an indifferent scholar until a successful fight with another boy aroused a spirit of emulation and led to his becoming first in the school. He displayed very early a taste and aptitude for mechanical contrivances; he made windmills, water clocks, kites, and sundials, and he is said to have invented a four-wheel carriage which was to be moved by the rider.

Appendix B 373

After the death of her second husband in 1656, Newton's mother returned to W oolsthorpe and removed her eldest son from school so that he might prepare himself to manage the farm. But it was soon evident that his interests were not in farming, and upon the advice of his uncle, the rector of Burton Coggles, he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1661 as one of the boys who performed menial services in return for their expenses. Although there is no record of his formal progress as a student, Newton is known to have read widely in mathematics and mechanics. His first reading at Cambridge was in the optical works of Kepler. He turned to Euclid because he was bothered by his inability to comprehend certain diagrams in a book on astrology he had bought at a fair; finding its propositions self-evident, he put it aside as "a trifling book," until his teacher, Isaac Barrow, induced him to take up the book again. It appears to have been the study of Descartes' Geometry which inspired him to do original mathematical work. In a small commonplace book kept by Newton as an undergraduate, there are several articles on angular sections and the squaring of curves, several calculations about musical notes, geometrical problems from Vieta and Van Schooten, annotations out of Wallis' Arithmetic of Infinities, together with observations on refraction, on the grinding of spherical optic glasses, on the errors of lenses, and on the extraction of all kinds of roots. It was around the time of his taking the Bachelor's degree, in 1665, that Newton disrovered the binomial theorem and made the first notes on his discovery of the "method of fluxions."

When the Great Plague spread from London to Cambridge in 1665, college was dismissed, and Newton retired to the farm in Lincolnshire, where he conducted experiments