Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/468

438 NEWTON NEWTON, a city of the United States, in Middlesex county, Massachusetts, about 8 miles west of Boston, on the south bank of the Charles river. It is divided into seven wards, and contains the post-villages of Auburndale, Chestnut Hill, Newton, Newton Centre, Newton Highlands, Newton Lower Falls, Newton Upper Falls, Newtonville, West Newton, and Nonantum. Newton is principally inhabited by Boston merchants, and, each village being a collection of fine residences with beautiful grounds, it has been designated " the Garden City of New England." The water-power furnished by the river is turned to account by numerous manufactories producing paper, hosiery, dye stuffs, emery paper, ink, soap, shoddy, &c. The first Baptist theological seminary in America was established in Newton Centre in 1826 ; it is now a flourishing institu tion with a library of 15,000 volumes, and five resident professors. Laselle Female Seminary at Auburndale dates from 1851. First settled in 1630, Newton was incorpo rated as a town in 1679, as a city in 1873. Its population was 3351 in 1840, 8382 in 1860, 12,825 in 1870, and 16,995 in 1880. NEWTON, SIR ISAAC (1642-1727), the greatest of natural philosophers, was born on the 25th of December 1*542 (o.s.), at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in the parish of Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, about 6 miles from Grantham. His father (also Isaac Newton) was the farmer of a small freehold property of his own. He died before his son s birth, a few months after his marriage to Hannah Ayscough, a daughter of James Ayscough of Market-Overton. When Newton was little more than two years old his mother married Mr Barnabas Smith, rector of the neighbouring parish of North Witham. Of this marriage there was issue, Benjamin, Mary, and Hannah Smith, and to their children Sir Isaac Newton subsequently left the greater part of his property. After having acquired the rudiments of education at two small schools in hamlets in close proximity to Woolsthorpe, Newton was sent at the age of twelve to the grammar school of Grantham, the head master of Avhich was Mr Stokes. While attending Grantham school Newton lived in the house of Mr Clark, an apothecary of that town. According to his own con fession he was far from industrious, and stood very low in his class. An unprovoked attack from the boy next above him led to a fight, in which Newton s pluck gave him the victory. This success seems to have led him to greater exertions in school, and after some time he rose to be the head boy of the school. He cared but little for the ordinary amusements of his schoolfellows, but he displayed very early a taste and an aptitude for mechanical con trivances. He made windmills, water-clocks, kites, and dials, and he is said to have invented a four-wheeled car riage which was to be moved by the rider. In 1656 Mr Smith died, and Newton s mother came back with her three children to Woolsthorpe. Newton was then in his fifteenth year, and, as his mother in all probability intended him to be a farmer, he was taken away from school. He was frequently sent on market days to Grantham with an old and trusty servant, who made all the purchases, while Newton spent his time among the books in Mr Clark s house. It soon became apparent to Newton s relatives that they were making a great mistake in attempting to turn him into a farmer, and he was therefore sent back again to school at Grantham. His mother s brother, Mr W. Ayscough, the rector of the next parish, was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and when he found that Newton s mind was wholly devoted to me chanical and mathematical problems^ he urged upon Mrs Smith the desirability of sending her son to his own college, a proposal to which she was not at all unwilling to give her consent. He was accordingly admitted a member of Trinity College on June 5, 1661, as a subsizar, and was matriculated on July 8. We have scarcely any informa tion as to his attainments when he commenced residence, and very little as to his studies at the university before he took the degree of bachelor of arts. It is known that while still at Woolsthorpe Sanderson s Logic, a book which his uncle had given him, had been read by him to such purpose that his tutor at Trinity College excused his attendance at a course of lectures on that subject. Newton tells us himself that, when he had purchased a book on astrology at Stourbridge fair, a fair held close to Cam bridge, he was unable, on account of his ignorance of trigonometry, to understand a figure of the heavens which was drawn in this book. He therefore bought an English edition of Euclid with an index of propositions at the end of it, and, having turned to two or three which he. thought likely to remove his difficulties, he found them so self-evident that he expressed his astonishment that any one should have taken the trouble to offer demonstrations of them. He therefore put aside Euclid "as a trifling book," and applied himself to the study of Descartes s Geometry. He had some difficulty in mastering this work, but he succeeded in doing so without any assistance. It is reported that in his examination for a scholarship at Trinity, to which he was elected on April 28, 1664, he was examined in Euclid by Dr Barrow, who formed a poor opinion of his knowledge, and that in consequence Newton was led to read the Elements again with care, and thereby to form a more favourable estimate of Euclid s merits. The study of Descartes s Geometry seems to have inspired Newton with a love of the subject, and to have introduced him to the higher mathematics. In a small, commonplace book, bearing on the seventh page the date of January 1663-4, there are several articles on angular sections, and the squaring of curves and " crooked lines that may be squared," several calculations about musical notes, geometrical propositions from Francis Vieta and Schooten, annotations out of Wallis s Arithmetic of Infinites, together with observations on refraction, on the grinding of "spherical optic glasses," on the errors of lenses and the method of rectifying them, and on the extraction of all kinds of roots, particularly those "in affected powers." And in this same commonplace book the following entry made by Newton himself, many years afterwards, gives a further account of the nature of his work during the period when he was an undergraduate: "July 4, 1699. By consulting an account of my expenses at Cambridge, in the years 1663 and 1664, I find that in the year 1664, a little before Christmas, I, being then Senior Sophister, bought Schooten s Miscellanies and Cartes Geometry (having read this Geometry and Oughtred s Clavis clean over half a year before), and borrowed Wallis s works, and by consequence made these annotations out of Schooten and Wallis, in winter between the years 1664 and 1665. At such time I found the method of Infinite Series ; and in summer 1665, being forced from Cambridge by the plague, I computed the area of the Hyperbola at Boothby, in Lincolnshire, to two and fifty figures by the same method." That Newton must have begun early to make careful observations of natural phenomena is sufficiently testified by the following remarks about halos, which appear in his Optics, book ii. part iv. obs. 13: " The like Crowns appear sometimes about the moon; for in the beginning of the Year 1664, February 19th, at night, I saw two- such Crowns about her. The Diameter of the first or innermost was about three Degrees, and that of the second about five Degrees, and an half. Next about the moon was a Circle of white, and next about that the inner Crown, which was of a bluish green within next the white, and of a yellow and red without, and next about these Colours were blue and green on the inside of the Outward Crown, and red on the outside of it. At the same time there appear d a Halo about 22 Degrees 35 distant from the center of the moon. It was elliptical, and its long Diameter was perpendicular to the Horizon, verging below farthest from the moon." In the month of January 1665 Newton took the degree