254 THE WORLD MACHINE 



The youth was rather more ignorant and uninstructed than 

 most country boys, even from the Lincolnshire whence he came. 

 He was of simple farm folk ; his mother had done what she could 

 to make him a good farmer lad like the rest, even to settling a 

 small holding upon him. In the economy of events, fate had 

 other uses for his wondrous brain. 



As a boy, like Galileo, he spent most of his time contriving 

 curious bits of mechanism, and devouring everything he could 

 get hold of upon such subjects. He made sundials, he made 

 water-clocks, windmills, and curious kites. It is even said that 

 he devised a four-wheeled carriage to be propelled by an occu- 

 pant ; he may have constructed the first motor-car. They 

 preserve a part of his sundial in the Royal Society. The thrifty, 

 practical mother was in despair ; she appeals to the parish 

 rector, and the rector finds Master Newton one morning under 

 a hedge studying mathematics when he ought to have been 

 marketing the farm's produce in town. Evidently the rector 

 had sense enough to see that such a boy had good stuff in him ; 

 and so on his advice Isaac gets a little schooling, and then is 

 off to the university. Beyond a question he would have found 

 his way eventually. As it is, it is a saving of time. 



He has a boy's devouring mind. At the Stourbridge Fair he 

 invests in a book on astrology, and is vexed to find that he 

 cannot understand a simple figure in trigonometry. So the 

 next he buys is an English copy of Euclid ; and it seems 

 to him childishly easy. Descartes' Geometry baffles him for 

 a little ; in the end, his opinion of it is not very high ; note 

 that he is then about twenty. Kepler's Optics fascinates 

 him ; so does a book on logic. There is an entry in his diary 

 that at this same time he read Wallis' works. The item is 

 significant. Wallis was at this time the most celebrated mathe- 

 matician in England. He had just put forth a treatise on 

 Gravity and Gravitation. This may have been a subject of 

 Newton's reflections when, a year or so later, the plague breaks 

 up the university term and he goes back to Lincolnshire, his 

 head in a violent ferment with all the new knowledge that has 

 come into it. 



Already he has made three or four considerable discoveries : 

 the binomial theorem, familiar enough now to every student of 

 algebra ; the theory of infinite series which is to lead to fluxions 

 in our modern parlance, the differential calculus ; he has 



