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HISTORY OF PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY.

This illustrious philosopher, who contributed more than any other mortalever did towards enlarging the domain of human knowledge, appears tohave been quite unconscious of any difference between himself and or-dinary inquirers of nature. Alluding to his discoveries in a letter to Dr.Bentley, he says, “ If I have done the public any service this way, it isdue to nothing but industry and patient thought.” In fact, it was onlyby the most strenuous contention of mind, and the sternest subjection ofthe will, that even Newton was enabled to penetrate into the more reconditeparts of the system of the world. One of his biographers has remarked *that, during the two years he was engaged in preparing the Principia , helived only to calculate and think. Oftentimes lost in the contemplation ofthose grand objects to which it relates, he acted unconsciously, his thoughtsappearing to take no cognizance of the ordinary concerns of life. Fre-quently, when rising in the morning, he would be arrested by some newconception, and would remain for hours seated on his bedside in a state ofcomplete abstraction. He would even have neglected to take sufficientnourishment if he had not been reminded by others of the time of hismeals. Speaking of the mode by which he arrived at his discoveries, hesaid, “ I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the firstdawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light.” Onanother occasion, when some of his friends were complimenting him onthe great results he had achieved, he replied : “ I know not what theworld will think of my labours, but to myself it seems to me that I havebeen but as a child playing on the sea-shore; now finding some pebblerather more polished, and now some shell rather more agreeably variegatedthan another, while the immense ocean of truth extended itself unexploredbefore me.” What a lesson of humility is here conveyed to those ex-plorers of nature who cannot congratulate themselves on the discoveryeven of such shells and pebbles as those which adorn the cabinet of thePrincipia .

Newton died on the 20tli March, 1727, at the advanced age ofeighty-five years. Unlike some of his illustrious predecessors, he con-tinued throughout his long career to receive the honours due to hisexalted genius, and his death was deplored as a national calamity. Hisfuneral obsequies were performed with the ceremonies usually confinedto persons of royal birth. His body lay in state in the JerusalemChamber, and v ; as subsequently interred in Westminster Abbey , his pallhaving been borne by six peers. A monument was erected over his re-mains, the inscription upon which concludes with the following suitablewords: “ Sibi gratulentur mortales, tale tantumque extitisse humanigeneris decus.”f

for this purpose, any more than we should be warranted in inferring from Fermat ’s theoryof Maxima and Minima, or Barrow’s Method of Tangents, that either of these mathema-ticians had discovered the Differential Calculus. The probability is, that in this, as in manyother instances, Newton solved the problem merely en passant, attending less to the meansthan the end to be obtained by them.

* Biot. Biographie Universelle.—See also Life of Newton, L.U.K.

f Let mortals congratulate themselves that so great an ornament of the human race hasexisted.