108 
MR. DE MORGAN ON A POINT CONNECTED WITH THE 
name, that Laplace once spells it Mechain, meaning Bradley’s friend, not his own 
contemporary. In this state, owing to the accidental omission of the additions made 
to the Committee, the evidence of Newton’s veracity was left: and considering the 
number of insinuations made by the partizans of the English side of the dispute 
against the moral character of Leibnitz, there can be little doubt that continental 
writers on the other side would have hit this apparent blot, if they had been able 
to see it. An accidental passage in a memoir of De Moivre led me to suspect 
the omission above described : and the Assistant Secretary, on my application, was 
good enough to examine the records of the time and to supply it. The biography to 
which I allude is the “ Memoire sur la vie et sur les ecrits de Mr. Abraham De 
Moivre .... par Mr. Maty. A la Haye, de l’imprimerie de H. Scheurleer, F. Z.” 
(12mo, no date). This Mr. Maty must have been Dr. Matthew Maty, who, as well 
as his son, was a secretary of the Society. lie was the intimate friend of De Moivre, 
and he mentions Dr. Birch as having consulted the registers of the Society for him on 
different points. He states that De Moivre was appointed on this committee on 
the I7th of April (the true date), and gives all the names. He also states that this 
transaction drew De Moivre out of the neutrality which till then he had observed. 
It is remarkable that Maty thus intimates that the mere fact of joining the Com- 
mittee was destruction to the character of a neutral. And Burnet himself, a 
member of the Committee, is stated by John Bernoulli (in his correspondence with 
Leibnitz) to have written a letter to him, giving him the information that the Royal 
Society was engaged in proving that Leibnitz might have seen certain letters of 
Newton, &c. These slight things tend to show that the Committee in question was 
thought at the time not to be a judicial body, but one of avowed partizans : and it is, 
I think, necessary for the character both of the Committee and the Society, that this 
truth, as I believe it to be, should be acknowledged. On any other supposition than 
that the Committee was meant to be Newtonian, for the defence (through Keil) of 
Newton, and not for the decision of the question, it would be difficult to explain 
with credit to the parties concerned, the selection of Arbuthnot, Burnet, and Aston, 
friends of Newton, but not known as mathematicians ; or of Brook Taylor, a Fellow 
of a few days standing, who had then published nothing, and was only known to the 
Society, or chiefly known, by his private correspondence with Keil, the nominal 
defendant. There may have been, and I often suspect there was, something of truth 
in the surmise of Leibnitz, who thought that the near prospect of the Hanoverian 
succession created some dislike against the subject and servant of the obnoxious 
Elector in the minds of the Jacobite portion of English science. “Amicus Anglus 
ad me scribit,” says Leibnitz, “videri [eos qui parum Domui Hanoveranse favent] 
aliquibus non tarn ut inathematicos et Societatis Regise Socios in Socium, sed ut 
Toryos in Whigium quosdam egisse.” I am unfortunate enough to differ from the 
general opinion in England as to the manner in which Leibnitz was treated, and 
this after much examination: I am therefore the belter qualified to call the attention 
