DISCOVERIES OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON. 453 



for painting, and active fingers to construct all sorts of little knick- 

 nacks and miniature machinery, •water-clocks, mill-wheels, Merlin's 

 carriages, kites of out-of-the-way shapes ; making a mouse his miller, 

 and driving pegs into the -wall to mark out the hours (" Isaac's dial " 

 is quite a lion in that rustic neighborhood ;) too sickly to mix much 

 in the rough sports of his playmates, yet not without plenty of spirit 

 on occasion, as witness the big boy whom he thrashes, then rubs the 

 vanquished nose against the church-yard wall ; and, not content with 

 this physical triumph, sets vigorously to work in school till he can 

 take down his enemy in the class. At the age of fifteen he is re- 

 called to take charge of his mother's farm, and the next year, when 

 " that wild wind made work" in which Oliver's great soul passed to 

 its account, Isaac was jumping backwards and forwards to measure 

 its velocity. The farm in such hands is not likely to pay ; he much 

 prefers lying under a hedge with a mathematical problem while the 

 servant goes on to Grantham market, and so, though the problem 

 proceeds to solution, the farm affairs verge towards dissolution, and 

 it is finally settled that he shall try his fortune at Cambridge, then, 

 as now, the gathering point for the mathematics of England. So in 

 his nineteenth year he enters Trinity as a Sizar and speedily wins 

 golden opinions from his tutors ; hardly a record is left of his life as 

 an undergraduate ; but it is impossuVe to doubt that he was a steady 

 hard-worker, yet not without occasional fits of relaxation, if we may 

 judge from such entries iu his diary of expenses as the following, otiose et 

 frustra expensa " Supersedeas, China ale, cherries, tart, bottled beere 

 marmelot, custards, sherbet and reaskes, beere, cake ;" and again, 

 " Chessemen and dial, Is. 4d. ; effigies amoris, Is. ; my bachelors' ac- 

 count, 27s. Gd. ; at the tavern several other times, £1 ; lost at cards 

 twice 15s., ' and the like. Most provokingly the Tripos list for the year 

 when he took his degree is missing, but who can doubt that he was 

 Senior Wrangler ? Scholar and then Fellow of his College, he succeed- 

 ed the famous Barrow in the Lucasian Chair in the year 16G9, being 

 then twenty-seven years old, and having by that time achieved nearly 

 all his grand discoveries, which, however, were not given to the world 

 for nearly a score of years. Tbe first thing which brought Newton 

 into public notice was the exhibition before the Boyal Society of the 

 reflecting telescope invented by him and made with his own hands, 

 which elicited from that body warm approval, and led to his election 

 as a Fellow thereof; this was followed by a short account of his 

 splendid discovery of the composite character of sunlight, read be- 

 fore the Society, and the publication of his treatise on Optics, the 

 substance of which hud already been delivered in his lectures from 



