102 MORRIS LOEB 



tham Grammar School, and in 1657 he returned to his 

 mother's farm; but he cannot have been a very successful 

 farmer, since he was described as a very dreamy boy, and al- 

 ways prone to study. Four years afterwards, by his uncle's 

 advice, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and very soon 

 made his mark as a mathematician. It was just at this time 

 that a great advance inaugurated by Descartes, the applica- 

 tion of algebra to geometrical calculations, was arousing the 

 interest of mathematicians. Stimulated by this, young New- 

 ton developed a still grander advance by the discovery of the 

 method of infinitesimals. 



His study at Trinity College was interrupted in 1665 by the 

 appearance of the plague in Cambridge, and he took refuge 

 at Woolsthorpe. A somewhat doubtful but well known 

 legend reports that here, in the summer of 1666, while he was 

 lying under an appletree and ruminating upon some mathe- 

 matical question, a falling apple drew his attention to those 

 phenomena which he later elucidated through his law of 

 gravitation. 



In 1667 he returned to Cambridge as one of the governing 

 board of his college, and two years later, at the age of twenty- 

 six, he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, and lec- 

 tured chiefly on optics, in which branch of physics he made 

 some of his most remarkable discoveries. From that time 

 on his life was a continuation of successes. In 1672 he was 

 elected to the newly founded Royal Society, practically the 

 oldest society for scientific research in the world, of which he 

 became President in 1703. In 1687 he published his magnum 

 opus, entitled " Philosophise Naturalis Principia Mathemat- 

 ical He was elected to Parliament in 1689, and served for 

 many years. In 1694 he was appointed Warden of the Mint, 

 and in 1697 Master of the Mint; and since his time it has 

 been the custom to entrust the British Mint to some master of 



