264 THE WORLD MACHINE 



Few men ever had greater powers of absorption in their work. 

 In his waking hours he was literally lost in calculation and 

 thought. Often he forgot to eat, sometimes to finish dressing 

 in the morning after he had arisen. 



This intense application, evidently, brought on an illness. 

 For a time there is little doubt that his mind was clouded. 

 There was a natural effort, alike on the part of friends and 

 subsequently by admiring biographers, to conceal or minimise 

 this. His own letters and the testimony of those who visited 

 him leave no question as to the fact. He recovered his health, 

 but never the vast powers of his intellect. At forty-five his 

 work was done. Years after, with the help of younger men, he 

 brought out a second edition of the Principia. His work on 

 Optiks was not published until 1704 ; it had been written 

 long before ; the delay was due purely to his controversy with 

 Hooke. 



The Principia had appeared on the eve of a dramatic revo- 

 lution in the political world ; in its own world it produced none. 

 The history of science is rarely spectacular. One might readily 

 think that such a work and such a man would have given rise 

 to a great school which for a long time after would have en- 

 sured the precedence of England in the scientific advance. They 

 did nothing of the sort. One wonders less, when considering 

 this, that the bold theories of Aristarchus should have seemed 

 to make so slight an impress in the Alexandrian days. For a 

 century after the Principia there is hardly a single great dis- 

 covery in English astronomy. Newton's work was taken up, 

 carried on to the last perfection of its details, by the mathe- 

 maticians of Germany and France. 



Highly regarded in England, it was yet forty years before 

 the Principia began to take effect on the Continent. Near a 

 half-century after its appearance, the French Academy of 

 Sciences, the most considerable body of its kind then existing, 

 was awarding a prize for the paper in which the movements 

 of the planets were explained on Descartes' theory of vortices 

 tourbillons. And the award was to Jean Bernouilli, one of 

 the three or four foremost mathematicians of the day. 



But what the impervious academic mind could not under- 

 stand, the freer mind of the laity might. So it was to a lay- 

 man, to the celebrated Voltaire, largely, that Newton's European 

 fame was due. A refugee in England, that myriad-minded 



