considered the Elements of Euclid with that attention which so excellent a writer deserves," Besides Descartes' Geometry, he studied Oughtred's Clavis, Kepler's Optics, the works of Vieta, Schooten's Miscellanies, Barrow's Lectures, and the works of Wallis. He was particularly delighted with Wallis' Arithmetic of Infinites, a treatise fraught with rich and varied suggestions. Newton had the good fortune of having for a teacher and fast friend the celebrated Dr. Barrow, who had been elected professor of Greek in 1660, and was made Lucasian professor of mathematics in 1663. The mathematics of Barrow and of Wallis were the starting-points from which Newton, with a higher power than his masters', moved onward into wider fields. Wallis had effected the quadrature of curves whose ordinates are expressed by any integral and positive power of . We have seen how Wallis attempted but failed to interpolate between the areas thus calculated, the areas of other curves, such as that of the circle; how Newton attacked the problem, effected the interpolation, and discovered the Binomial Theorem, which afforded a much easier and direct access to the quadrature of curves than did the method of interpolation; for even though the binomial expression for the ordinate be raised to a fractional or negative power, the binomial could at once be expanded into a series, and the quadrature of each separate term of that series could be effected by the method of Wallis. Newton introduced the system of literal indices.
Newton's study of quadratures soon led him to another and most profound invention. He himself says that in 1665 and 1666 he conceived the method of fluxions and applied them to the quadrature of curves. Newton did not communicate the invention to any of his friends till 1669, when he placed in the hands of Barrow a tract, entitled De Analysi per Æquationes Numero Terminorum Infinitas, which was sent
