THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



attracting particle." He deduced from this law that 

 the earth must be flattened at the poles ; he deter- 

 mined the orbit of the moon and of comets ; he ex- 

 plained the precession of the equinoxes, the semi- 

 diurnal tides, the ratio of the mass of the moon 

 and the earth, of the sun and the earth, etc. No 

 wonder that Laplace considered that Newton's Prin- 

 tipia was assured a preeminence above all the other 

 productions of the human intellect. It is no detrac- 

 tion from Newton's merit to say that Halley, Hooke, 

 Wren, Huygens, Bulliau, Picard, and many other 

 contemporaries (not to mention Kepler and his pred- 

 ecessors), as well as the organizations in which 

 they were units, share the glory of the result which 

 they cooperated to achieve. On the contrary, he 

 seems much more conspicuous in the social firma- 

 ment because, in spite of the austerity and seeming 

 independence of his genius, he formed part of a sys- 

 tem, and was under its law. 



Shortly after the founding of the Royal Society, 

 correspondence, for which a committee was appointed, 

 had been adopted as a means of gaining the coopera- 

 tion of men and societies elsewhere. Sir John Moray, 

 as President, wrote to Monsieur de Monmort, around 

 whom, after the death of Mersenne, the scientific 

 coterie in Paris had gathered. This group of men, 

 which toward the close of the seventeenth century 

 regarded itself, not unnaturally, as the parent soci- 

 ety, was in 1666 definitely organized as the Acad- 

 emie Royale des Sciences. Finally, Leibnitz, who 

 had been a Fellow of the Royal Society as early as 

 1673, and had spent years in the service of the 

 Dukes of Brunswick, was instrumental in the estab- 



