a kl al 
EDINBURGH REVIEW. 343 
place, the acceleration of the motion of that luminary is 
found to be connected with a particular change in the 
form of the earth’s orbit, &c. &c. The journals of science, 
when they are edited by men of recognized merit, thus 
acquire, on certain subjects, an influence which some- 
times becomes fatal. It is thus I conceive that we may 
describe the influence which the Hdinburgh Review has 
sometimes exercised. 
Among the contributors to that celebrated journal at 
its commencement, a young writer was eminently distin- 
guished, in whom the discoveries of Newton had inspired 
an ardent admiration. This sentiment so natural, so 
legitimate, unfortunately led him to misconceive the plau- 
sible, ingenious, and fertile character of the doctrine of 
interferences. The author of this theory had not, per- 
haps, always taken care to clothe his decisions, his state- 
ments, his critiques, with those more polished forms of 
expression the claims of which ought never to be neg- 
lected, and which moreover, became a matter of imper- 
ative duty when the question referred to the immortal 
author of the Natural Philosophy* [the Principia ?] 
* It seems impossible to make this sentence intelligible unless we 
suppose the “ immortal author’”’ spoken of to be Newton, and by con- 
sequence that the title Natural Philosophy was a slip of the writer’s 
pen, for Principia. Yet the supposition that the hostility of the Edin- 
burgh Review was at all called forth by any want of courtesy towards 
Newton in the writings of Young is wholly unsupported by any thing 
in Young’s papers, in which he cites the views of Newton with the 
greatest respect.— Translator. 
Newton’s support of the emission theory of light-—The authority of 
names can never be of any avail to the truly inductive philosopher,— 
his motto is emphatically “nullius in verba.’’ But there has been 
always a propensity among writers on the subject to dwell on such 
authority, and to array great names on either side of any of those contro- 
verted points which have divided the scientific world. Perhaps where 
the question is purely one of opinion and refers simply to hypotheses, 
