SIR ISAAC NEWTON, the most remarkable mathematician and natural philosopher of his own, or perhaps of any, age, was born at Woolsthorp, in Lincolnshire, in 1642. That year, remarkable in English history for breaking out of civil war between Charles I and the Parliament, is doubly remarkable in the history of Science by the birth of Newton and the death of Galileo. The circumstances with which the pursuit of truth, in scientific matters, was at this time surrounded in the respective countries of these great philosphers, were not more different than the characters of these philosphers themselves. Galileo died a prisoner, under the surveillance of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy, as Milton says, "otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought." In England, it had become the practice, and soon became the fashion through the influence of Bacon and Descartes, to discard altogether the dictates of authority in matters of science. The dispositions of the philosphers were happily suited to the situations in which they found themselves. Galileo's was a mind whose strength and determination grew by the opposition it encountered. The disposition of Newton, on the other hand, diffident of the value and interest of his own labors, and shrinking from the encounter of even scientific controversy, might have allowed his most remarkable discoveries to remain in obscurity, had it not been for the constant and urgent solicitation of his friends that they should be published to the world.
Newton received his early education at the grammar school of Grantham, in the neighborhood of his home, at Woolsthorpe. On the 5th of June, 1661, he left home for Cambridge, where he was admitted as subsizar at Trinity College. He immediately applied himself to the mathematical studies of the place, and within a very few years must have not only made himself master of most of the works of any value on such subjects then existing, but had also begun to make some progress in the methods for extending the science. In the year 1665, he committed to writing his first discovery on fluxions; and it is said that in the same year, the fall of an apple, as he sat in his garden at Woolsthorpe, suggested the most magnificent of his subsequent discoveries - the law of universal gravitation. On his first attempt, however, by means of the law so suggested to his mind, to explain the lunar and planetary motions, he employed an estimate then in use of the radius of the earth, which was so erroneous as to produce a discrepancy between the real force of gravity and that required by theory to explain the motions. He accordingly abandoned the hypothesis for other studies. These other pursuits to which he thus betook himself, consisted chiefly of investigations into the nature of light, and the constitution of telescopes.
It was on the 11th of January 1671, that Newton was elected a member of the Royal Society, having become known to that body from his reflecting telescopes. At what period he resumed his calculations about gravitation, employing the more correct measure of the earth obtained by Picard in 1670, does not clearly appear; but it was in the year 1684, that it became known to Halley that he was in possession of the whole theory and its demonstrations. It was on the urgent solicitation of Halley that he was induced to write a systematic treatise about these principles and their demonstrations. The principal results of his discoveries were set down in a treatise called De Motu Corporum, and afterwards more completely unfolded in the great work entitled Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which was finally published about midsummer 1687.
Shortly before the Principia was given to the public, Newton had been called to take an active part in defending the right of the university against the illegal encroachments of James II. The conspicuous part which he had taken on that occasion procured him a seat in the Convention Parliament, in which he sat from January 1689 to its dissolution in 1690. In 1696 he was appointed Warden of the Mint, and was afterwards promoted to the office of Master of the Mint, in 1699, an office which he held to the end of his life. Newton died on the 20th of March, 1727, and his remains received a resting place in Westminster Abbey, where a monument was erected to his memory in 1731.