ISI3-] Sir Isaac Newton. 403 



Gregory, and Newton. The committee reported, that it ap- 

 peared to them that Newton had the method in or hefore the 

 year 16G9, and it did not appear to them that Mr. Leibnitz had 

 it before the year 1677 5 a year after the communication of a 

 letter from Newton to Leibnitz, in which the method of Auctions 

 was sufficiently described for every intelligent person. They 

 add, that the differential method of Leibnitz was the same as the 

 fluetionary calculus of Newton, the notation excepted j that they 

 regard Newton as the first inventor of that method, and that 

 Dr. Keill in saying so has done, in their opinion, no injury to 

 Leibnitz.* 



The dispute did not and could not well terminate here. 

 Leibnitz complained bitterly of the Commercium Epistolicum, 

 and threatened to publish a reply that would confound his anta- 

 gonists. But he was wise enough not to attempt it. Indeed, it 

 would have been a hopeless and impossible task to have at- 

 tempted to overturn the evidence, contained in the Commercium 

 Epistolicum, of the priority of Newton as the inventor of Auc- 

 tions. Several anonymous papers were published, either by 

 Leibnitz or his friends, in which Newton was rather attacked 

 than Leibnitz defended. Bernoulli even attempted to prove that 

 Newton did not understand the differential method, as far as the 

 higher orders of Auctions are concerned. At last Leibnitz, 

 associating himself with his friends, the Bernoullis, had recourse 

 to a method which, he conceived, would demonstrate his supe- 

 riority over the British mathematicians, and thus give his claim 

 of originality a greater chance of obtaining credit. This was to 

 propose difiicult problems to embarrass his adversaries. Newton 

 had formerly solved two celebrated problems proposed by John 

 Bernoulli in the year lo'D/, and an anonymous solution was 

 published that year in the Philosophical Transactions. He 

 received the first problem, proposed by the triumvirate, to con- 

 found the British mathematicians, after he had undergone a 

 good deal of fatigue in the Mint, and yet he solved it before he 

 went to bed. 



During the course of this dispute the extreme partiality which 

 united Bernoulli to Leibnitz induced him to treat Newton with 

 an unbecoming severity, and even injustice. He published^in 

 th.: Acta Lipsica, under a disguised name, a most violent attack 

 upon Keill, in which he endeavours to prove that Newton did 

 not understand the rules of second differenciation. His opinion 

 was founded upon a passage in the Treatise on the Quadrature of 

 Curves, in which Newton, from inadvertence, lutd represented 

 the different orders of Auctions by the terms of his binomial 



• The bnl edition of the Commercium Epistolirum is the octavo of 1729 

 which sontalm Kversl articlei net to tic found in Uic original quarto rdit ,, 



2t:' 



