234 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Paris, when it was prohibited in France except by the approba- 

 tion of the Faculty of Paris, and later occurred two deaths in Rome, 

 whereupon the Pope issued an edict forbidding transfusion with- 

 in his domains. 



December 21, 1671. The minutes contain this sentence : " The 

 Lord Bishop of Sarum (Dr. Seth Ward) proposed for candidate 

 Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks at Cambridge." 

 At this same meeting was shown a reflecting telescope made by 

 Newton to overcome the objections hitherto pertaining to the 

 refracting telescope. Upon receiving the society's hearty con- 

 gratulations upon his invention, Newton promised to send the 

 philosophical experiments which led to its construction. This 

 promise he fulfilled, and the result was his famous work on " Op- 

 tics." Newton now was fully launched upon that career as inves- 

 tigator and discoverer which has covered his name with immor- 

 tal renown. He was yet scarcely thirty years of age. But even 

 as a boy he had displayed an earnest of his future work by con- 

 structing windmills, water-clocks, and sun-dials ; one of the latter 

 is said to still mark the hours upon the walls of his old manor- 

 house at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire ; when only twenty-three he 

 discovered his method of fluxions, by means of which the calcu- 

 lations of the movements of the planets were greatly facilitated, 

 and he already was in possession of the principle of gravitation, 

 which saw light sixteen years later, only because an erroneous 

 estimate of the earth's diameter, which was a factor in his calcu- 

 lations, produced some inexplicable deviation from the result 

 expected. 



Newton, like Boyle, never married, but devoted his long life 

 entirely to scientific and philosophical studies. Newton was 

 elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, and successively 

 re-elected until his death in 1727, thus making his presidency 

 exceed that of any other, excepting Sir Joseph Banks, in the his- 

 tory of the society. This honor was not unfittingly bestowed, 

 for there is no other name, in the long list of distinguished Fel- 

 lows, whose life-work has reflected greater honor upon this already 

 famous society. 



In 1675 the Royal Society appealed to the king to establish an 

 astronomical observatory for the study of astronomy and naviga- 

 tion. This the king consented to do, and commissioned Sir Chris- 

 topher Wren to erect such a building at Greenwich. The Royal 

 Society was given general supervision over its investigations, and 

 evinced its solicitude by furnishing all the instruments used at 

 the observatory during the first fifteen years. 



Under Flamsteed as the first astronomical observator, or as- 

 tronomer royal as the office was afterward called, and Halley as 

 his successor, there began the long and unbroken series of impor- 



