12 DISSERTATION SECOND. 



• IMPT IJ. 



of the Principia just referred to, gave a highly favourable 

 opinion on the subject of the discoveries of Leibnitz. 



The quiet, however, that now prevailed between the En- 

 glish and German philosophers, was clearly of a nature to be 

 easily disturbed. With the English was conviction, and, as 

 we have seen, a well grounded conviction, that the first dis- 

 covery of the Infinitesimal Analysis was the property of New- 

 ton ; but the analysis thus discovered was yet unknown to 

 the public, and was in the hands of the inventor and his 

 friends. With the Germans, there was the conviction, also 

 well founded, that the invention of their countryman was 

 perfectly originial ; and they had the satisfaction to see hig 

 calculus everywhere adopted, and himself considered all 

 over the continent as the sole inventor. The friends of 

 Newton could not but resist this latter claim, and the friends 

 of Leibnitz, seeing that their master had become the great 

 teacher of the new calculus, could not easily bring them- 

 selves to acknowledge that he was not the first discoverer. 

 The tranquillity that existed under such circumstances, if 

 once disturbed, was not likely to be speedily restored. 



Accordingly, a remark of Fatio de Duillier, a mathemati- 

 cian, not otherwise very remarkable, was sufficient to light 

 up a flame which a whole century has been hardly sufficient 

 to extinguish. In a paper on the line of swiftest descent, 

 which he presented to the Royal Society in 1699, was this sen- 

 tence : " I hold Newton to have been the first inventor of this 

 calculus, and the earliest, by several years, induced by the 

 evidence of facts ; and whether Leibnitz, the second inven- 

 tor, has borrowed any thing from the other, I leave to the 

 judgment of those who have seen the letters and manuscripts 

 of Newton." Leibnitz replied to this charge, in the Leipsic 

 Journal, without any asperity, simply stating himself to have 

 been, as well as Newton, the inventor ; neither contesting 



