SEQUEL TO THE EPOCH OF NEWTON. 425 



openly. I am quite sure tbat any one who looks into this matter will 

 see that this supposition of any unwillingness at Cambridge to receive 

 Newton's doctrine is quite absurd, and can prove nothing but the 

 intense prejudices of those who maintain such an opinion. Newton 

 received and held his professorship amid the unexampled admiration 

 of all contemporary members of the University. Whiston, who is 

 sometimes brought as an evidence against Cambridge on this point, 

 says, " I with immense pains set myself with the utmost zeal to the 

 study of Sir Isaac Newton's wonderful discoveries in his Philosophic 

 Naturalis Principia Mathematica, one or two of which lectures I had 

 heard him read in the public schools, though I understood them not at 

 the time." As to Rohault's Physics, it really did contain the best me- 

 chanical philosophy of the time ; — the doctrines which were held by 

 Descartes in common with Galileo, and with all the sound mathema- 

 ticians who succeeded them. Nor does it look like any great antip- 

 athy to novelty in the "University of Cambridge, that this book, which 

 was quite as novel in its doctrines as Newton's Principia, and which 

 had only been published at Paris in 1671, had obtained a firm hold 

 on the University in less than twenty years. Nor is there any attempt 

 made in Clarke's notes to conceal the novelty of Newton's discoveries, 

 but on the contrary, admiration is claimed for them as new. 



The promptitude with which the Mathematicians of the University 

 of Cambridge adopted the best parts of the mechanical philosophy of 

 Descartes, and the greater philosophy of Newton, in the seventeenth 

 century, has been paralleled in our own times, in the promptitude with 

 which they have adopted and followed into their consequences the 

 Mathematical Theory of Heat of Fourier and Laplace, and the Undu- 

 latory Theory of Light of Young and Fresnel. 



In Newton's College, we possess, besides the memorials of him men- 

 tioned above (which include two locks of his silver-white hair), a paper 

 in his own handwriting, describing the preparatory reading which was 

 necessary in order that our College students might be able to read the 

 Principia. I have printed this paper in the Preface to my Edition of 

 the First Three Sections of the Principia in the original Latin (1846). 



Bentley, who had expressed his admiration for Newton in his Boyle's 

 Lectures in 1692, was made Master of the College in 1699, as I have 

 stated ; and partly, no doubt, in consequence of the Newtonian sermons 

 which he had preached. In his administration of the College, he 

 zealously stimulated and assisted the exertions of Cotes, Whiston, and 

 other disciples of Newton. Smith, Bentley's successor as Master of 



