THE NEW SCIENCE 15 



prudent, and as confident and magisterial, as if he had been Pro- 

 locutor at the first Council of Nice. And he wonders very much 

 that they will pretend to be Gownmen, whereas he cannot see so 

 much as Cartes 's Principles, nor Gassendus's Syntagma, lying upon 

 the table ; and that they are all so sottish and stupid as not to sell 

 all their Libraries and send presently away for a whole wagon full 

 of New Philosophy. 'I'll tell you. Sir,' says one of these small 

 Whiflers, perhaps, to a grave, sober, and judicious Divine, 'the 

 University is strangely altered since you were there; we are all 

 grown strangely inquisitive and ingenious. I pray. Sir, how went 

 the business of I\Iotion in your Days? We hold it all now to be 

 violent, — ' " and so on. The "Whippersnapper's" criticism of the 

 sermon is exquisitely sketched. Then follows a slash at the younger 

 members of Gresliam College, who ask "to what purpose is it to 

 preach to people, and go about to save them, without Telescopes, 

 and a Glass for Fleas ?"58 



That the new science was being agitated in the universities is 

 clear enough. And the larger ideas were fast being accepted by 

 thinking men. "The study of the New Philosophy, and with it 

 Mathematics generally, had gained some ground at our University 



(Cambridge) when Sir "W. Browne went up there in 1707 By 



this time those studies (Principia, Optics, Arithmetica Univers- 

 alis) were extensively diffused in the university, and copies of the 

 Principia were in such request that in 1710 one which was or- 

 iginally published at ten shillings was considered cheap at two 

 guineas".'^ "From the moment of their appearance (Newton's 

 discoveries), they rapidly made their way from one class of thinkers 

 to another nearly as fast as the nature of men's intellectual capacity 

 allows ".«° 



The character of the courses offered at the 'universities may be 

 determined from the following, which is the outline of a series of 

 lectures in Chemistry: "An Encomium on Dr. Friend, the first 

 who applied Newtonian philosophy to Chemistry. Calcinations. 

 Distillation of Hartshorn. Analysis of Plants distilled in the 

 Great Alembic. Distillation of Vitriol. Tincture of Myrrh, Aloes, 



" Euchard, John, Observations on the Inquiry into the Grounds and Occasion of th« 

 Contempt of the Clergy, 1671, pp. 142, 147. 



*• Wordsworth, C, Scholae Academicae, p. 69. 

 •"Whewell, William, History of Ind. Science, p. 421. 



