CONCERNING A TRACT BY FIENUS.
De Cometa anni 1618 dissertationes Thomæ Fieni[[106]] et Liberti Fromondi[[107]] ... Equidem Thomæ Fieni epistolica quæstio, An verum sit Cœlum moveri et Terram quiescere? London, 1670, 8vo.
This tract of Fienus against the motion of the earth is a reprint of one published in 1619.[[108]] I have given an account of it as a good summary of arguments of the time, in the Companion to the Almanac for 1836.
ON SNELL'S WORK.
Willebrordi Snellii. R. F. Cyclometricus. Leyden, 1621, 4to.
This is a celebrated work on the approximative quadrature, which, having the suspicious word cyclometricus, must be noticed here for distinction.[[109]]
ON BACON'S NOVUM ORGANUM.
1620. In this year, Francis Bacon[[110]] published his Novum Organum,[[111]] which was long held in England—but not until the last century—to be the work which taught Newton and all his successors how to philosophize. That Newton never mentions Bacon, nor alludes in any way to his works, passed for nothing. Here and there a paradoxer ventured not to find all this teaching in Bacon, but he was pronounced blind. In our day it begins to be seen that, great as Bacon was, and great as his book really is, he is not the philosophical father of modern discovery.
But old prepossession will find reason for anything. A learned friend of mine wrote to me that he had discovered proof that Newton owned Bacon for his master: the proof was that Newton, in some of his earlier writings, used the