300 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



1st That Newton was the first inventor of the Method of Flux- 

 ions ; that the method was incomplete in its notation ; and that the 

 fundamental principle of it was not published to the world till 1687, 

 twenty years after he had invented it. 



2d That Leibnitz communicated to Newton in 1677 his Differential 

 Calculus, with a complete system of notation, and that he published 

 it in 1684, three years before the publication of Newton's Method. 



Brewster. 



It is said that when the Queen of Prussia asked Leibnitz his opinion 

 of Sir Isaac Newton, he replied that taking mathematicians from the 

 beginning of the world to the time when Sir Isaac lived, what he had 

 done was much the better half ; and added that he had consulted all 

 the learned in Europe upon some difficult points without having 

 any satisfaction and that when he applied to Sir Isaac, he wrote 

 him in answer by the first post, to do so and so, and then he would 

 find it. 



The exalted estimation in which Newton's genius has been 

 held in later times may be illustrated by the following passages. 



The great Newtonian Induction of Universal Gravitation is in- 

 disputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever 

 made, whether we look at the advance which it involved, the extent 

 of the truth disclosed, or the fundamental and satisfactory nature of 

 this truth. Whewell 



The efforts of the great philosopher . . . were always super- 

 human ; the questions which he did not solve were incapable of solu- 

 tion in his time. Arago. 



Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, and the most 

 fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world 

 to establish. Lagrange. 



His own attitude is sufficiently indicated in his statements : 



I do not know what I may appear to the world, but, to myself, 

 I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and divert- 

 ing myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier 

 shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undis- 

 covered before me. 



If I have seen farther than Descartes, it is by standing on the 

 shoulders of giants. (See also Appendix.) 



