262 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1857. In this review ] Brewster's objections and omissions were 

 refuted and supplied. The faults of Newton in the matter 

 of Flamsteed and Leibnitz are proved, and in relation to 

 the order of the discovery of Fluxions the character of 

 Leibnitz received its due testimony: 



f We shall not stop to investigate the various forms in 

 which Sir D. Brewster tries to make him out tricking and 

 paltry. We have gone through all the stages which a 

 reader of English works can go through. We were 

 taught, even in boyhood, that the Royal Society had made 

 it clear that Leibnitz stole his method from Newton. By 

 our own unassisted research into original documents we 

 have arrived at the conclusion that he was honest, candid, 

 unsuspecting, and benevolent. His life was passed in law, 

 diplomacy, and public business ; his leisure was occupied 

 mostly by psychology, and in a less degree by mathe- 

 matics. Into this last science he made some incursions, 

 produced one of the greatest of its inventions almost 

 simultaneously with one of its greatest names, and made 

 himself what Sir D. Brewster calls the " great rival " 

 of Newton in Newton's most remarkable mathematical 

 achievement.' 



The reviewer speaks of the pleasure he derived as a 

 boy from Brewster's invention, the kaleidoscope : 



' The two deans of optical science in Britain and in 

 France, Sir David Brewster and M. Biot, are both bio- 

 graphers of Newton, and take rather different sides on 

 disputed points. Sir D. Brewster was the first writer on 

 optics in whose works we took an interest ; but we do 

 not mean printed works. We, plural as we are, remember 

 well the afternoon, we should say the half-holiday, when 



1 Speaking of the titles of all the parties concerned, Mr. Be Morgan 

 says, ' Sir David never neglects the knighthood of Newton. . . . Should 

 we survive Sir David, we shall Brewster him. We hold that those 

 who are gone, when of a certain note, are entitled to the compliment 

 .of the simplest nomenclature.' In the tracts on the Commercium Epis- 

 tolicum he reverses the usual phrase, saying, " Inasmuch as knighthood 

 was not honoured with Newton until," &c.' 



