Notes
Rule X.—ALWAYS KEEP A PROPER BALANCE. That is to say, it often happens that in the original too much space is given to picturesque details, and too little to the more important facts. In your précis this must be put right.
This is obviously the case in the following Life of Isaac Newton.
No. 17—Isaac Newton
Newton was born in 1643, and was the smallest baby in the world. He went to school when very young, but does not appear to have done any work till one day the top-boy kicked him violently in the stomach for daring to get his sums right. Then Newton began to work, not with any idea of becoming the greatest of mathematicians, but simply because he resented being kicked in the stomach, and determined to get the better of his tormentor. His spare time was spent in making ingenious little contrivances, water-clocks, paper lamps attached to kites with which to frighten the villagers, a ‘wind-mill’ turned by a pet mouse with a string tied to its tail. When he left school he was tried on the farm, but it was no use. Newton was always behind a hedge inventing some new automatic toy, while the pigs wallowed in clover, and the cows trampled down the corn. So he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and there his serious studies began.
His first discoveries were on the subject of light, about which very little was then known. On darkening his room and allowing a circular beam of sunlight to pass through a hole in the shutter, and thence through a triangular glass prism, he found that an oblong patch of light was cast on the screen five times as long as the hole in the shutter. Moreover, it was no longer white, but made up of all the colours of the rainbow—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red—always ranged in the same order. He soon came to the conclusion that white is not a separate colour, but is made up of all the colours of the ‘spectrum’.
He next invented the reflecting telescope, forerunner of all the vast instruments by means of which the wonders of the sky have been investigated.
He then turned his great mind to the problem of finding out what light really is, and, though his theory has been given up for a better, it was the best that had been suggested up to that time. He also found out that light travels at the rate of nearly 200,000 miles a second.