27C SIR ISAAC NEWTON. 



help others to gain the lower eminences lying within their 

 reach ; while admiration excited and curiosity satisfied are 

 frames of mind both wholesome and pleasing. Nothing new, 

 it is true, can be given in narrative, hardly anything in 

 reflection, less still perhaps in comment or illustration ; but 

 it is well to assemble in one view various parts of the vast 

 subject, with the surrounding circumstances whether acci- 

 dental or intrinsic, and to mark in passing the misconceptions 

 raised by individual ignorance, or national prejudice, which 

 the historian of science occasionally finds crossing his path. 



The remark is common and is obvious, that the genitis of 

 Newton did not manifest itself at a very early age. His 

 faculties were not, like those of some great and many ordinary 

 individuals, precociously developed. Among the former, 

 Clairaut stands pre-eminent, who, at thirteen years of age, 

 presented to the Royal Academy a memoir of great originality 

 upon a difficult subject in the higher geometry; and at 

 eighteen, published his celebrated work on Curves of Double 

 Curvature, composed during the two preceding years. Pascal, 

 too, at sixteen, wrote an excellent treatise on Conic Sections. 

 That Newton cannot be ranked in this respect with those 

 extraordinary persons, is owing to the accidents which pre- 

 vented him from entering upon mathematical study before his 

 eighteenth year ; and then a much greater marvel was wrought 

 than even the Clairauts and the Pascals displayed. His 

 earliest history is involved in some obscurity ; and the most 

 celebrated of men has in this particular been compared to the 

 most celebrated of rivers,* as if the course of both in its 

 feebler state had been concealed from mortal eyes. We have 

 it, however, well ascertained that within four years, between 

 the age of 18 and 22, he had begun to study mathematical 

 science, and had taken his place among its greatest masters ; 

 learnt for the first time the elements of geometry and analysis, 

 and discovered a calculus which entirely changed the face of 

 the science ; effecting a complete revolution in that and in 



* The Nile. 



