Things not generally Known. 



was a great ingredient." " His brick furnaces, pro re nata, he made 

 and altered himself without troubling a bricklayer." " What obser- 

 vations he might make with his telescope, I know not, but several of 

 his observations about comets and the planets may be found scattered 

 here and there in a book intitled The Elements of Astronomy, by Dr. 

 David Gregory."* 



NEWTON'S " APPLE-TREE." 



Curious and manifold as are the trees associated with the 

 great names of their planters, or those who have sojourned in 

 their shade, the Tree which, by the falling of its fruit, sug- 

 gested to Newton the idea of Gravity, is of paramount interest. 

 It appears that, in the autumn of 1665, Newton left his college 

 at Cambridge for his paternal home at Woolsthorpe. " When 

 sitting alone in the garden," says Sir David Brewster, "and 

 speculating on the power of gravity, it occurred to him, that as 

 the same power by which the apple fell to the ground was not 

 sensibly diminished at the greatest distance from the centre of 

 the earth to which we can reach, neither at the summits of 

 the loftiest spires, nor on the tops of the highest mountains, 

 it might extend to the moon and retain her in her orbit, in 

 the same manner as it bends into a curve a stone or a cannon- 

 ball when projected in a straight line from the surface of the 

 earth." Life of Newton, vol. i. p. 26. Sir David Brewster 

 notes, that neither Pemberton nor Whiston, who received from 

 Newton himself his first ideas of gravity, records this story of 

 the falling apple. It was mentioned, however, to Voltaire by 

 Catherine Barton, Newton's niece ; and to Mr. Green by Mar- 

 tin Folkes, President of the Royal Society. Sir David Brewster 

 saw the reputed apple-tree in 1814, and brought away a portion 

 of one of its roots. The tree was so much decayed that it was 

 cut down in 1820, and the wood of it carefully preserved by 

 Mr. Tumor, of Stoke Rocheford. 



* The story of the dog " Diamond" having caused the burning of certain 

 papers is laid in London, and in Newton's later years. In the notes to Maude's 

 ~W enUysdal?. a person then living (1780) relates, that Sir Isaac being called out 

 of bis study to a contiguous room, a little dog, called Diamond, the constant 

 but incurious attendant of his master's researches, happened to be left among 

 the papers, and by a fatality not to be retrieved, as it was in the latter part of 

 Sir Isaac's days, threw down a lighted candle, which consumed the almost 

 finished labour of some years. Sir Isaac returning too late but to behold the 

 dreadful wreck, rebuked the author of it with an exclamation (ad sidern p/ilmas), 

 " O Diamond ! Diamond ! thou little knowest the mischief done!" without adding 

 a single stripe. M. Biot gives this fiction as a true story, which happened 

 Borne years after the publication of the Prii.cipin; and he characterises the acci- 

 dent as having deprived the sciences forever of the fruit of so much of Newton's 

 labours. Brewster's Life. vol. ii. p. 1P9, note. Dr. Newton remarks, that Sir 

 Isaac never had any communion with dogs or cats; and Sir David Brewster 

 adds, that the view which M. Biot has taken of the idle story of the dog Dia- 

 mond, charged with fire-raising among Newton's manuscripts, and of the influ- 

 ence of this accident upon the mind of their author, is utterly incomprehensible. 

 The fiction, however, was turned to account in giving colour to M. Biot'b misre- 

 presentation. 



