wife were "never blessed with an addition to their family." I never met with such accuracy elsewhere. Of William Morgan I add that my surname and pursuits have sometimes, to my credit be it said, made a confusion between him and me. Dates are nothing to the mistaken; the last three years of Morgan's life were the first three years of my actuary-life (1830-33). The mistake was to my advantage as well as to my credit. I owe to it the acquaintance of one of the noblest of the human race, I mean Elizabeth Fry,[[497]] who came to me for advice about a philanthropic design, which involved life questions, under a general impression that some Morgan had attended to such things.[[498]]
NEWTON AGAIN OVERTHROWN.
A treatise on the sublime science of heliography, satisfactorily demonstrating our great orb of light, the sun, to be absolutely no other than a body of ice! Overturning all the received systems of the universe hitherto extant; proving the celebrated and indefatigable Sir Isaac Newton, in his theory of the solar system, to be as far distant from the truth, as many of the heathen authors of Greece and Rome. By Charles Palmer,[[499]] Gent. London, 1798, 8vo.
Mr. Palmer burned some tobacco with a burning glass, saw that a lens of ice would do as well, and then says:
"If we admit that the sun could be removed, and a terrestrial body of ice placed in its stead, it would produce the same effect. The sun is a crystaline body receiving the radiance of God, and operates on this earth in a similar manner as the light of the sun does when applied to a convex mirror or glass."
Nov. 10, 1801. The Rev. Thomas Cormouls,[[500]] minister of Tettenhall, addressed a letter to Sir Wm. Herschel, from which I extract the following:
"Here it may be asked, then, how came the doctrines of Newton to solve all astronomic Phenomina, and all problems concerning the same, both a parte ante and a parte post.[[501]] It is answered that he certainly wrought the principles he made use of into strickt analogy with the real Phenomina of the heavens, and that the rules and results arizing from them
agree with them and resolve accurately all questions concerning them. Though they are not fact and true, or nature, but analogous to it, in the manner of the artificial numbers of logarithms, sines, &c. A very important question arises here, Did Newton mean to impose upon the world? By no means: he received and used the doctrines reddy formed; he did a little extend and contract his principles when wanted, and commit a few oversights of consequences. But when he was very much advanced in life, he suspected the fundamental nullity of them: but I have from a certain anecdote strong ground to believe that he knew it before his decease and intended to have retracted his error. But, however, somebody did deceive, if not wilfully, negligently at least. That was a man to whom the world has great obligations too. It was no less a philosopher than Galileo."
That Newton wanted to retract before his death, is a notion not uncommon among paradoxers. Nevertheless, there is no retraction in the third edition of the Principia, published when Newton was eighty-four years old! The moral of the above is, that a gentleman who prefers instructing William Herschel to learning how to spell, may find a proper niche in a proper place, for warning to others. It seems that gravitation is not truth, but only the logarithm of it.