688 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



elusions to his friends before he completes his work for publication, and the more 

 punctilious and careful he is the longer will such completion be delayed. In the 

 meantime, however, another person who has equal or better opportunities for 

 the investigation hears of this work, hurries through a few experiments or 

 calculations, and brings out the whole idea as his own. Cases of this kind abound 

 in every branch of science, and have a paralysing effect. Thus, in one well- 

 known case, a most important method for the diagnosis of certain diseases was 

 discovered by two workers but could not be perfected by them for want of 

 material. One of them, however, mentioned the method at a Congress. A third 

 person who was present at the Congress possessed much material, and was able 

 to verify and complete the method in a few weeks and to publish it immediately. 

 The result has been that this third person's name has been attached to the 

 discovery and that the names of the original inventors have been forgotten 

 in connection with it, except among the students of scientific history. It is 

 supposed to be an honourable thing for a man of science to be open regarding all 

 his work, but, as will be seen from this example, he may lose much by being so. 

 In this case, the worker who obtained the credit for the discovery behaved quite 

 honourably and mentioned that he had received the hint at the Congress, and the 

 credit fell to him without his seeking for it in any way. 



But in other cases the second or third party is not so innocent, and makes a 

 deliberate effort to obtain credit really due to another ; and it often happens that 

 a mere hint of A's researches is sufficient to set B upon the track, and if B is 

 an unscrupulous person he can pretend that he has made the whole discovery 

 independently of A, and, as the world is not too much interested in scientific 

 work, B may succeed in this without giving much evidence in favour of his 

 claims. The Newton-Leibniz controversy is perhaps the most famous one of this 

 class, not excepting that of Harvey and the Italians. As every one knows, the 

 controversy raged over what may perhaps be described as the most important dis- 

 covery ever made — namely, that of the Calculus. There is no doubt that Newton 

 framed the skeleton and muscles of the Calculus when he was about twenty-three 

 years of age — namely, from 1664-66. On the other hand, Leibniz seems scarcely to 

 have commenced his investigations on this subject until 1673 (when he was in 

 England), and did not complete his notation until two years later. The notation 

 of Leibniz is certainly different from that of Newton, and the former advanced the 

 Calculus in many important directions ; but the question is whether he did not 

 receive the hint of the whole great system from Newton's work. De Morgan 

 seems to conclude otherwise, and attacks Newton and his friends for attributing 

 plagiarism to Leibniz. But we must confess that his essays on the subject are far 

 from convincing. They are written in a rapid style but with so many parentheses 

 and in such involved language that we often have a difficulty in following him. 

 Besides that, he gives no consecutive history of the facts and nothing like a 

 sufficient analysis of the respective contributions of Newton and Leibniz to the 

 Calculus. Moreover, he appears not to have made a sufficient study of Newton's 

 manuscripts, for on p. 33 of the present book he makes much capital out of the 

 idea that Newton did not develop a proper algorithm for his fluxions until 1677, 

 whereas we learn from the editor's note on the same page that Newton uses his dots 

 as early as 1665, which completely upsets De Morgan's contention. Still further, 

 De Morgan does not assure us on the vital point (which is quite possible) that, 

 apart from all letters, manuscripts, or public documents, Leibniz may have 

 obtained the outline of Newton's system from the conversation of other mathema- 

 ticians, and that such hints may have sufficed to set him at work on the subject 



