SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S ROOMS AND LABORATORY IN TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

Of the rooms occupied by Newton during his early residence at Cambridge, it is now difficult to settle the locality. The chamber allotted to him as Fellow, in 1667, was “the Spiritual Chamber,” conjectured to have been the ground-room, next the chapel, but it is not certain that he resided there. The rooms in which he lived from 1682 till he left Cambridge, are in the north-east corner of the great court, on the first floor, on the right or north of the gateway or principal entrance to the college. His laboratory, as Dr. Humphrey Newton tell us, was “on the left end of the garden, near the east end of the chapel; and his telescope (refracting) was five feet long, and placed at the head of the stairs, going down into the garden.”[4] The east side of Newton’s rooms has been altered within the last fifty years: Professor Sedgwick, who came up to college in 1804, recollects a wooden room, supported on an arcade, shown in Loggan’s view, in place of which arcade is now a wooden wall and brick chimney.

Dr. Humphrey Newton relates that in college Sir Isaac very rarely went to bed till two or three o’clock in the morning, sometimes not till five or six, especially at spring and fall of the leaf, when he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire scarcely going out either night or day; he sitting up one night, and Humphrey another, till he had finished his chemical experiments. Dr. Newton describes the laboratory as “well furnished with chymical materials, as bodyes, receivers, heads, crucibles, &c., which was made very little use of, y^e crucibles excepted, in which he fused his metals: he would sometimes, though very seldom, look into an old mouldy book, which lay in his laboratory; I think it was titled Agricola de Metallis, the transmuting of metals being his chief design, for which purpose antimony was a great ingredient.” “His brick furnaces, pro re nata, he made and altered himself without troubling a bricklayer.” “What observations he might make with his telescope, I know not, but several of his observations about comets and the planets may be found scattered here and there in a book intitled The Elements of Astronomy, by Dr. David Gregory.”[5]