your rays and focus them on one point. Isaac Newton LITTLE 

 could do it. " On a winter day I took a small glass and JOURNEYS 

 so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole in my 

 coat," he wrote in his subsizar journal. 

 The youth possessed an imperturbable coolness he 

 talked little, but when he spoke it was very frankly and 

 honestly. From any other his words would have had 

 a presumptuous and boastful sound. As it was he was 

 respected and beloved. At Cambridge his face and 

 features commended him he looked like another Cam- 

 bridge man, one Milton John Milton only his face 

 was a little more stern in its expression than that of 

 the author of " Paradise Lost." 



In two years' time Isaac Newton was a scholar whom 

 all Cambridge knew. He had prepared able essays on 

 the squaring of curved and crooked lines, on errors in 

 grinding lenses and the methods of rectifying them, 

 and in the extraction of roots where the cubes were 

 imperfect : he had done things never before attempted 

 by his teachers. When they called upon him to recite, 

 it was only for the purpose of explaining truths which 

 they had not mastered. 



In 1664, being in his twenty-second year, Isaac Newton 

 was voted a free scholarship, which provided for board, 

 books and tuition. On this occasion he was examined 

 in Euclid by Dr. Barrow, the head Master of Trinity. 

 Q Newton could solve every problem, but could not 

 explain why or how. His methods were empirical- 

 those of his own. Many men with a modicum of math- 

 ematical genius work in this way and in practical life 



79 



