300 NOTES TO BOOK VII. 



abridgement of Mr. FlamsteecTs works," and unfit to see 

 the light. 



(H.) p. 203. I perceive that my accomplished Ger- 

 man translator, Littrow, has incautiously copied the in- 

 sinuations of some modern writers to the effect that 

 Clarke's reference to Newton, in his Edition of Renault's 

 Physics, was a mode of introducing Newtonian doctrines 

 covertly, when it was not allowed him to introduce such 

 novelties openly. I am quite sure that any one who looks 

 into this matter will see that this supposition of any un- 

 willingness at Cambridge to receive Newton's doctrine is 

 quite absurd, and can prove nothing but the intense pre- 

 judices of those who maintain such an opinion. Newton 

 received and held his professorship amid the unexampled 

 admiration of all contemporary members of the Univer- 

 sity. 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 Mathematics one or two of which 

 lectures I had heard him read in the publick schools, though 

 I understood them not at the time." As to Renault's 

 Physics, it really did contain the best mechanical philo- 

 sophy of the time; the doctrines which were held by 

 Descartes in common with Galileo, and with all the sound 

 mathematicians who succeeded them. Nor does it look 

 like any great antipathy 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 



