APPENDIX. 439 



charges Leibnitz with having endeavoured to appropriate 

 Mouton s discovery by denying that he had seen his work 

 before he made the discovery himself.* 



It must unfortunately be added, that Leibnitz s con 

 duct in the controversy relating to the invention of the 

 calculus, leaves an unfavourable impression. There was 

 great disingenuousness, to give it no harsher name, in 

 John Bernouilli s proceedings, by the confession of his own 

 family ; and Leibnitz, who had encouraged him, betrayed 

 the secret confided to him of his authorship, for the mere 

 purpose of grasping at an advantage, by means of the autho 

 rity which Bernouilli s great name in the mathematical 

 world gave to his decision against Newton, whom he had 

 opposed by anonymous writings to please his patron. All 

 this, however, we must admit, only affords ground for en 

 tertaining suspicions ; and the proof required must be 

 sought for in the internal evidence of the works compared 

 together. 



The fact of the abstract having appeared in the same 

 work the June preceding is admitted by him, as is his 

 having read it. The account, however, which it contains 

 of the Principia is exceedingly general ; none of the inves 

 tigations are given of the propositions which it states that 

 the work enunciates. We can only consider it as showing 

 that the truths of which it gives a concise summary, are 

 proved by the application of mathematical reasoning to the 

 known phenomena ; and a person so learned in this science 

 as Leibnitz could not have read that the Principia treated 

 of the descriptions of various trajectories, particularly the 

 conic sections, according to various data (juxta varia data, 

 p. 308.), without perceiving at once that this must refer to 

 dynamical considerations. But especially must he have per 

 ceived in what manner Newton had conducted his investi 

 gations, when he found it stated (p. 310.) that the heavenly 



* This was probably Mouton s method of interpolation for places between 

 those calculated, instead of proportional parts. 



