1822.] FroJ\ Playfair on the University/ of Cambridge. 139 



been recently made by some eminent writers of Scotland with 

 respect to the history of the Newtonian philosophy in this Uni 

 versity. The assertions of which I speak are to be found in the 

 second part of the late Professor Playfair's " Dissertation on 

 the History of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences," which 

 accompanies the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica : 

 and are repeated to a certain extent in the second part of the 

 corresponding Dissertation on the History of the Moral and 

 Metaphysical Sciences by Mr. Dugald Stewart. The first of 

 these authors has stated, that in the University of Cambridge 

 the Cartesian system kept its ground for more than 30 years 

 after the publication of Newton^s discoveries in 1687 : and that, 

 at the end of that interval, the Newtonian philosophy entered 

 the University by ** stratagem," and under the protection of the 

 Cartesian, in consequence of the publication of a translation of 

 Rohault's Physics, accompanied with notes, by Clarke, about 

 1718: the purport of the notes possibly escaping the notice of 

 the " learned doctors," who, the writer seems to have thought, 

 had the principal direction of academical education. A belief 

 is further expressed in a note, that " the Universities of St. An- 

 drew's and Edinburgh were the first in Britain where the New- 

 tonian philosophy was made the subject of the academical 

 prelections." 



I shall be as brief as possible in showing how extremely inac- 

 curate these statements are. One of the principal proofs 

 adduced is an expression of Whiston's, in his Memoirs, where 

 he says that David Gregory was inculcating the Newtonian 

 hypothesis at Edinburgh, while they ('' poor wretches ") at 

 Cambridge were studying the Cartesian. Considering the great 

 age of Whiston when he wrote his Hfe, his expulsion from the 

 University, and his notorious inaccuracy, he cannot be considered 

 as unexceptionable authority on this side of the question. But 

 it is curious enough that in the very page of his book in which 

 this passage is found, he also speaks of setting himself " to the 

 study of Sir Isaac Newton's wonderful discoveries, in his Philo- 

 sophise Naturahs Principia Mathematica, one or two of which 

 lectures," he says, " 1 had heard him read in the public schools, 

 though I understood them not at all at that time." These 

 *' academical prelections" were probably previous to the publi- 

 cation of the Principia in 1687 ; and at all events it seems a 

 strange undertaking to set up a claim of priority for any other 

 lectures, in opposition to those of Newton himself upon his own 

 philosophy. And, little as the reader would suppose it from the 

 statements above referred to, his successors in this professorship 

 were as zealous promulgators of his doctrines as their contempo- 

 raries in any other place. Newton was Mathematical Professor 

 at Cambridge at the time when he pubhshed the Principia, and con- 

 tinued so for 16 years afterwards. The same Whiston became, 

 in 1699, his deputy, and in 1703 his successor ; in which capaci- 



