No. II.
LETTER FROM SIR ISAAC NEWTON TO FRANCIS ASTON, ESQ., A YOUNG FRIEND WHO WAS ON THE EVE OF SETTING OUT UPON HIS TRAVELS.
Mr. Aston was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1678. He held the office of Secretary between 1681 and 1685; and he was the author of some observations on certain unknown ancient characters, which were published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1693.
This letter has been referred to in pages 270 and 303, and was written when Newton was only twenty-six years of age. It is in every respect an interesting document.
“Trinity College, Cambridge,
May 18, 1669.“Sir,
“Since in your letter you give mee so much liberty of spending my judgement about what may be to your advantage in travelling, I shall do it more freely than perhaps otherwise would have been decent. First, then, I will lay down some general rules, most of which, I believe, you have considered already; but if any of them be new to you, they may excuse the rest; if none at all, yet is my punishment more in writing than yours in reading.
“When you come into any fresh company, 1. Observe their humours. 2. Suit your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their converse more free and open. 3. Let your discours be more in querys and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being the designe of travellers to learne, not to teach. Besides, it will persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to you; whereas nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than peremtorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming wiser or much more ignorant than your company. 4. Seldom discommend any thing though never so bad, or doe it but moderately, lest you bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansom retraction. It is safer to commend any thing more than it deserves, than to discommend a thing soe much as it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with oppositions, or, at least, are not usually soe ill resented by men that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate into men’s favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison. 5. If you bee affronted, it is better, in a forraine country, to pass it by in silence, and with a jest, though with some dishonour, than to endeavour revenge; for, in the first case, your credit’s ne’er the worse when you return into England, or come into other company that have not heard of the quarrell. But, in the second case, you may beare the marks of the quarrell while you live, if you outlive it at all. But, if you find yourself unavoidably engaged, ’tis best, I think, if you can command your passion and language, to keep them pretty evenly at some certain moderate pitch, not much hightning them to exasperate your adversary, or provoke his friends, nor letting them grow overmuch dejected to make him insult. In a word, if you can keep reason above passion, that and watchfullnesse will be your best defendants. To which purpose you may consider, that, though such excuses as this,—He provok’t mee so much I could not forbear,—may pass among friends, yet amongst strangers they are insignificant, and only argue a traveller’s weaknesse.
“To these I may add some general heads for inquirys or observations, such as at present I can think on. As, 1. To observe the policys, wealth, and state-affairs of nations, so far as a solitary traveller may conveniently doe. 2. Their impositions upon all sorts of people, trades, or commoditys, that are remarkable. 3. Their laws and customs, how far they differ from ours. 4. Their trades and arts wherein they excell or come short of us in England. 5. Such fortifications as you shall meet with, their fashion, strength, and advantages for defence, and other such military affairs as are considerable. 6. The power and respect belonging to their degrees of nobility or magistracy. 7. It will not be time mispent to make a catalogue of the names and excellencys of those men that are most wise, learned, or esteemed in any nation. 8. Observe the mechanisme and manner of guiding ships. 9. Observe the products of nature in several places, especially in mines, with the circumstances of mining and of extracting metals or minerals out of their oare, and of refining them; and if you meet with any transmutations out of their own species into another (as out of iron into copper, out of any metall into quicksilver, out of one salt into another, or into an insipid body, &c.), those, above all, will be worth your noting, being the most luciferous, and many times lucriferous experiments too, in philosophy. 10. The prices of diet and other things. 11. And the staple commoditys of places.
“These generals (such as at present I could think of), if they will serve for nothing else, yet they may assist you in drawing up a modell to regulate your travells by. As for particulars, these that follow are all that I can now think of, viz. Whether at Schemnitium, in Hungary (where there are mines of gold, copper, iron, vitrioll, antimony, &c.), they change iron into copper by dissolving it in a vitriolate water, which they find in cavitys of rocks in the mines, and then melting the slimy solution in a strong fire, which in the cooling proves copper. The like is said to be done in other places, which I cannot now remember; perhaps, too, it may be done in Italy. For about twenty or thirty years agone there was a certain vitrioll came from thence (called Roman vitrioll), but of a nobler virtue than that which is now called by that name; which vitrioll is not now to be gotten, because, perhaps, they make a greater gain by some such trick as turning iron into copper with it than by selling it. 2. Whether, in Hungary, Sclavonia, Bohemia, near the town Eila, or at the mountains of Bohemia near Silesia, there be rivers whose waters are impregnated with gold; perhaps, the gold being dissolved by some corrosive waters like aqua regis, and the solution carried along with the streame, that runs through the mines. And whether the practice of laying mercury in the rivers, till it be tinged with gold, and then straining the mercury through leather, that the gold may stay behind, be a secret yet, or openly practised. 3. There is newly contrived, in Holland, a mill to grind glasses plane withall, and I think polishing them too; perhaps it will be worth the while to see it. 4. There is in Holland one —— Borry, who some years since was imprisoned by the Pope, to have extorted from him secrets (as I am told) of great worth, both as to medicine and profit, but he escaped into Holland, where they have granted him a guard. I think he usually goes clothed in green. Pray inquire what you can of him, and whether his ingenuity be any profit to the Dutch. You may inform yourself whether the Dutch have any tricks to keep their ships from being all worm-eaten in their voyages to the Indies. Whether pendulum clocks do any service in finding out the longitude, &c.
“I am very weary, and shall not stay to part with a long compliment, only I wish you a good journey, and God be with you.
“Is. Newton.
“Pray let us hear from you in your travells. I have given your two books to Dr. Arrowsmith.”
No. III.
“A REMARKABLE AND CURIOUS CONVERSATION BETWEEN SIR ISAAC NEWTON AND MR. CONDUIT.”
“I was on Sunday night, the 7th of March, 1724–5, at Kensington with Sir Isaac Newton, in his lodgings, just after he was come out of a fit of the gout, which he had had in both his feet, for the first time, in the eighty-third year of his age. He was better after it, and his head clearer, and memory stronger than I had known them for some time. He then repeated to me, by way of discourse, very distinctly, though rather in answer to my queries than in one continued narration, what he had often hinted to me before, viz. that it was his conjecture (he would affirm nothing) that there was a sort of revolution in the heavenly bodies; that the vapours and light emitted by the sun, which had their sediment as water and other matter, had gathered themselves by degrees into a body, and attracted more matter from the planets, and at last made a secondary planet (viz. one of those that go round another planet) and then by gathering to them, and attracting more matter, became a primary planet; and then by increasing still became a comet, which after certain revolutions, by coming nearer and nearer to the sun, had all its volatile parts condensed, and became a matter fit to recruit and replenish the sun (which must waste by the constant heat and light it emitted) as a fagot would this fire if put into it (we were sitting by a wood fire), and that that would probably be the effect of the comet of 1680, sooner or later, for, by the observations made upon it, it appeared, before it came near the sun, with a tail only two or three degrees long; but by the heat it contracted in going so near the sun, it seemed to have a tail of thirty or forty degrees when it went from it; that he could not say when this comet would drop into the sun; it might perhaps have five or six revolutions more first, but whenever it did it would so much increase the heat of the sun that this earth would be burnt, and no animals in it could live. That he took the three phenomena seen by Hipparchus, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler’s disciples to have been of this kind, for he could not otherwise account for an extraordinary light as those were, appearing all at once among the fixed stars (all which he took to be suns enlightening other planets as our sun does ours) as big as Mercury or Venus seems to us, and gradually diminishing for sixteen months, and then sinking into nothing. He seemed to doubt whether there were not intelligent beings superior to us who superintended these revolutions of the heavenly bodies by the direction of the Supreme Being. He appeared also to be very clearly of opinion that the inhabitants of this world were of a short date, and alleged as one reason for that opinion, that all arts, as letters, ships, printing, needle, &c., were discovered within the memory of history, which could not have happened if the world had been eternal; and that there were visible marks of ruin upon it which could not be effected by a flood only. When I asked him how this earth could have been repeopled if ever it had undergone the same fate it was threatened with hereafter by the comet of 1680, he answered, that required the power of a Creator. He said he took all the planets to be composed of the same matter with this earth, viz. earth, water, stones, &c., but variously concocted. I asked him why he would not publish his conjectures as conjectures, and instanced that Kepler had communicated his; and though he had not gone near so far as Kepler, yet Kepler’s guesses were so just and happy that they had been proved and demonstrated by him. His answer was, ‘I do not deal in conjectures.’ But upon my talking to him about the four observations that had been made of the comet of 1680, at 574 years’ distance, and asking him the particular times, he opened his Principia, which laid on the table, and showed me there the particular periods, viz. 1st, the Julium Sidus, in the time of Justinian, in 1106, in 1680.
And I, observing that he said there of that comet, ‘incidet in corpus solis,’ and in the next paragraph adds, ‘stellæ fixæ refici possunt,’ told him I thought he owned there what we had been talking about, viz. that the comet would drop into the sun, and that fixed stars were recruited and replenished by comets when they dropped into them; and, consequently, that the sun would be recruited too; and asked him why he would not own as freely what he thought of the sun as well as what he thought of the fixed stars. He said, ‘that concerned us more;’ and, laughing, added, ‘that he had said enough for people to know his meaning.’”
The preceding paper, with the title prefixed to it, was first published by Mr. Turnor in his Collections, &c. p. 172. It was found among the Portsmouth manuscripts, in the handwriting of Mr. Conduit.
THE END.