The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, 1642. Died in London, 1727. Aged 85.] This illustrious man was educated at Grantham, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in the year 1660. Before he had reached his twenty-third year, he had already made various important discoveries in pure mathematics; amongst others, the celebrated “Binomial Theorem,” familiar to every tyro, and that most refined and powerful instrument of scientific investigation, the “Method of Fluxions,” which, a few years later, was independently discovered by the famous Leibnitz, and given to the world in the form now universally known as the “Differential Calculus.” Newton was still young when the fall of an apple gave birth in his mind to the first germ of “the Law of Gravitation,” which, some years later, he so beautifully and wonderfully developed. In 1666--his age twenty-four--he began those experiments with the prism which quickly led him to “The Decomposition of Light,” and to other optical discoveries, unfolded in the lectures delivered by him at Cambridge, as the successor of Barrow, from the year 1669. In his thirtieth year, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society; in 1703, its President; and he was re-elected to this distinguished post year after year, for twenty-five years. His great work, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” appeared complete in 1687. It has excited the astonishment and profound admiration of the greatest philosophers in all nations, from that time to the present; and no wonder, since, in some respects, this grand production might almost seem to have resulted from actual inspiration, and not from the mere day labour of an unassisted human intellect. The mighty teacher was the originator of views and theories, upon which the ablest philosophical minds of the last century and of the present have built their most renowned achievements, yet we are most admonished by his humility, his religion, and his calm. Newton was member of Parliament for Cambridge. He was also master of the Mint. Honour was shown to him living and dead. George I. ordered that his body should, after lying in state, be buried in Westminster Abbey. What luminary is without its dark spot? Leibnitz and Newton were the two greatest men of their age, yet a bitter and lasting quarrel between them is recorded, for our solemn instruction. It remains to state that the year in which Galileo died, Newton was born. No interval was suffered between the extinction of the one essential light and the kindling of the other. [By Roubilliac.]