We now arrive at the period when Newton permanently withdrew from the seclusion of a collegiate, and entered upon a more active and public life. He was appointed Warden of the Mint, in 1695, through the influence of Charles Montague, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and afterward Earl of Halifax. The current coin of the nation had been adulterated and debased, and Montague undertook a re-coinage. Our author's mathematical and chemical knowledge proved eminently useful in accomplishing this difficult and most salutary reform. In 1699, he was promoted to the Mastership of the Mint—an office worth twelve or fifteen hundred pounds per annum, and which he held during the remainder of his life. He wrote, in this capacity, an official Report on the Coinage, which has been published; he also prepared a Table of Assays of Foreign Coins, which was printed at the end of Dr. Arbuthnot's Tables of Ancient Coins, Weights, and Measures, in 1727. Newton retained his Professorship at Cambridge till 1703. But he had, on receiving the appointment of Master of the Mint, in 1699, made Mr. Whiston his deputy, with all the emoluments of the office; and, on finally resigning, procured his nomination to the vacant Chair. In January 1697, John Bernoulli proposed to the most distinguished mathematicians of Europe two problems for solution. Leibnitz, admiring the beauty of one of them, requested the time for solving it to be extended to twelve months—twice the period originally named. The delay was readily granted. Newton, however, sent in, the day after he received the problems, a solution of them to the President of the Royal Society. Bernoulli obtained solutions from Newton, Leibnitz and the Marquis De L'Hopital; but Newton's though anonymous, he immediately recognised "tanquam ungue leonem," as the lion is known by his claw. We may mention here the famous problem of the trajectories proposed by Leibnitz, in 1716, for the purpose of "feeling the pulse of the English Analysts." Newton received the problem about five o'clock in the afternoon, as he was returning from the[Pg 45] Mint; and though it was extremely difficult and he himself much fatigued, yet he completed its solution, the same evening before he went to bed.