536 POPULAR LECTURES AND ADDRESSES. 



in 1728. Till then, as he himself says, there were 

 not twenty Newtonians out of England. 1 



In the second quarter of the century sentiment 

 and opinion in France, Germany, Switzerland, and 

 Italy experienced a great change. The mathe- 

 matical prize questions proposed by the French 

 Academy naturally brought the two sets of 

 opinions into conflict. A Cartesian memoir of 



* 



John Bernoulli was the one which gained the 

 prize in 1730. It not unfrequently happened that 

 the Academy, as if desirous to show its impartiality, 

 divided the prize between Cartesians and New- 

 tonians. Thus, in 1734, the question being the 

 cause of the inclination of the orbits of the planets, 

 the prize was shared between John Bernoulli, 

 whose memoir was founded on the system of 

 vortices, and his son Daniel, who was a Newtonian. 

 The last act of homage of this kind to the Cartesian 

 system was performed in 1740, when the prize on 

 the question of the tides was distributed be- 

 tween Daniel Bernoulli, Euler, Maclaurin, and 

 Cavallicri ; the last of whom had tried to amend 



1 Whcwc-ll's llisliny of the Inductile Sciences, vol. 2, p. 2OI. 



