no remuneration for his services; not even that of board and lodging. This offer Newport accepted, and although enduring great privations, fulfilled his engagement. He then came to London and obtained a nomination to University college, where the professors on learning his circumstances gave him gratuitous admission to their lectures. He passed the College of Surgeons and the Apothecaries' Hall in 1835. For the next few years he prosecuted the practice of his profession, at the same time devoting all his leisure to scientific pursuits. In the latter period of his life science almost entirely occupied his attention. In 1844 and 1845 he was elected president of the Entomological Society, of which he had been one of the first members. In 1846 he became F.R.S., and in the following year a fellow of the Linnæan Society. In the same year he received from her majesty a pension of £100 per annum, in consideration of his merits as a laborious and disinterested cultivator of science. He was the author of the article "Insecta" in the Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology, and of numerous memoirs in the Philosophical Transactions, and the Transactions of the Linnæan and Entomological societies. His memoirs on the nervous system of Insecta and the higher Articulata, and his observations on the impregnation of the ovum in the Amphibia, are amongst the principal results of his labours. He twice received the royal medal from the Royal Society. He died of bronchitis on April 7th, 1854.—F. C. W.
NEWTON, Gilbert Stuart, R.A., was born at Halifax in Nova Scotia, in 1794, and was taught painting by his uncle, Gilbert Stuart, the portrait-painter, who had made a reputation in England as "American Stuart," and in 1807 had settled in Boston, United States. Newton came to England in 1818, then visited Italy, and afterwards entered as a student in the London royal academy. He commenced as a portrait-painter, but acquired his reputation by his small subject pictures, which are remarkable for their beautiful colouring and spirited execution. His masterpiece is "Captain Macheath," painted in 1825, which was purchased by the marquis of Lansdowne for five hundred guineas. In 1832 Newton revisited his native country and married there. He returned to London, and at the close of that year was elected a royal academician, having been four years an associate; but a picture of "Abelard in his Study," exhibited in 1833, was his last picture. He was afflicted with aberration of mind, and died at Chelsea, August 5th, 1835.—R. N. W.
NEWTON, Sir Isaac, a distinguished mathematician and natural philosopher, was born in the manor house of Woolsthorpe, in the parish of Colsterworth, in Lincolnshire, on the 25th December, o.s., 1642, the same year in which Galileo died. His father, who bore the same name, owned and farmed the manor of Woolsthorpe, and died a few months after his marriage to Hannah Ayscough. Mrs. Newton gave premature birth to a sickly child, so small "that he might have been put into a quart mug." The infant, however, grew in size and strength, destined to acquire high intellectual powers, and attain a more than octogenarian age. The manor, worth about £30 per annum, had been in the family upwards of a hundred years, but in the possession of parties who did not know their descent. Sir Isaac in 1705 had reason to suppose from tradition that he was descended from John Newton of Westby in Lincolnshire, but it is certain that twenty years later he believed that he was descended from a family in East Lothian in Scotland. In 1645, when his mother was married to the Rev. Barnabas Smith, he was placed under her care, and sent to two little day schools at Skillington and Stoke. When twelve years of age he went to the public school at Grantham, taught by Mr. Stokes, and was boarded with Mr. Clark, an apothecary. For some time he occupied a low place in the school, but having quarreled with a boy, his superior in the class, he gained the physical mastery over him, and having successfully striven also to surpass him in scholarship, he finally rose to be the head of the school. After attaining this position our young scholar spent his leisure hours in all kinds of mechanical operations, constructing with rude tools wind-mills, water-clocks, sun-dials, and a carriage driven by the person who sat in it. But while flying paper kites, and frightening the country people with paper lanterns tied to their tails, he was occupied also with drawing and copying portraits, and to some extent with writing verses. After the death of the Rev. Mr. Smith in 1656 his mother returned to Woolsthorpe with her three children, Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah Smith. Her son Isaac, who had now reached his fifteenth year, was recalled from school with much of the instruction which Mr Stokes could supply, in order to assist in the management of the little farm; but though he performed many of the duties thus imposed upon him, marketing at Grantham with an old servant of the family, yet he devolved upon him the more important duties, and found it more agreeable to devour some favourite author at the road-side than to buy and sell in the market-place. When our young scholar was found ill qualified for the sober pursuits of the field, he was sent back to Grantham school, where he remained for nine months in diligent preparation for a university course. He accordingly went to Cambridge in June, 1661, and on the 5th of that month he was admitted sub-sizar at Trinity college, and matriculated sizar on the 8th of July, very ill prepared for the studies which he was about to pursue. Sanderson's Logic he had read before he left home; Kepler's Optics he perused at the desire of his tutor; and having purchased a book on astrology, with diagrams which puzzled him, he had recourse to Euclid's Elements to assist him in understanding them. Some of the propositions, however, appeared to him so self-evident, that he threw Euclid aside as "a trifling book," and devoted himself in the summer of 1663 to the study of Descartes' Geometry. In 1664, as he himself tells us, a little before Christmas, when he was senior sophister, he bought Schooten's Miscellanea and Descartes' Geometry, which he had read "clean over" half a year before. At the same time he borrowed Wallis' works, and in the winter of 1664-65 he copied those annotations out of Schooten and Wallis which exist in his "Common Place Book." At this time he discovered the method of infinite series, and in the summer of 1665, being forced from Cambridge by the plague, he computed the area of the hyperbola, at Boothby in Lincolnshire, to two and fifty figures by the same method. On the 28th April, 1664, he was elected to one of the vacant scholarships in Trinity college, and during the same year he had impaired his health by long-continued observations on the comet. In January, 1665, he took the degree of B.A. In May of the same year he discovered the method of fluxions, and in November he showed their application to the drawing of tangents, and "the finding the radius of curvity of any curve." It was probably in the autumn of this year (1665) that he was led to speculate on the force of gravity, and to consider that the same force by which an apple fell to the ground might extend to the moon and the other planets and keep them in their orbits. About the commencement of 1666 he procured a glass prism in order "to try therewith the phenomena of colours." On his return to Cambridge on the 1st October, 1667, he was elected minor-fellow, and on the 10th March, 1668, he took his degree of M.A., and stood twenty-third on the list of one hundred and forty-eight. While occupied with the subjects of fluxions and gravity he "applied himself to the grinding of optic glasses of other figures than spherical," with the view, no doubt, of correcting spherical aberration; but having found that "light is a heterogeneous mixture of differently refrangible rays" which could not be collected into one focus, he abandoned "his glass works" in order "to take reflections into consideration." The reappearance of the plague, however, and other causes, prevented him from doing anything for two years, but in the end of 1668 he made a reflecting telescope 6⅓ inches long, with a speculum 6 inches in aperture, and a magnifying power of 38, which showed him Jupiter's four satellites and the crescent of Venus. In 1669 when Dr. Barrow resigned the Lucasian professorship of mathematics, Newton was appointed his successor, and from this time he began to communicate to the Royal Society an account of those splendid discoveries which excited such interest throughout the scientific world. A description of his reflecting telescope was the first of these communications. The telescope itself was sent to the society and shown to the king, and before a year had elapsed a fellow of Trinity college made a similar instrument of nearly the same size, which Newton considered better than his own. In consequence of this communication Newton was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on the 10th January, 1672. Although he had explained his grand discovery of the different refrangibility of the rays of light in his lectures between 1669 and 1671, it was not known to the members of the society. In a letter to their secretary dated 18th January, 1672, he offered to read an account of what "in his judgment, was the oddest, if not the most considerable detection which had hitherto been made in the operations of nature." This was the discovery that white light consisted of rays of different colours and different refrangibility, a discovery that involved him in controversies with Hook, Huygens, and several very inferior
