This communication from Dr. Halley induced the author, on June 20th,
to address a long letter to him, in which he gives a minute and able
refutation of Hooke's claims; but before this letter was despatched another
correspondent, who had received his information from one of the members
that were present, informed Newton "that Hooke made a great stir,
pretending that he had all from him, and desiring they would see that
he had justice done him." This fresh charge seems to have ruffled the
tranquillity of Newton; and he accordingly added an angry and satirical
postscript, in which he treats Hooke with little ceremony, and goes so far
as to conjecture that Hooke might have acquired his knowledge of the law
from a letter of his own to Huygens, directed to Oldenburg, and dated
January 14,1672-1673. "My letter to Hugenius was directed to Mr. Oldenburg,
who used to keep the originals. His papers came into Mr. Hooke's
possession. Mr. Hooke, knowing my hand, might have the curiosity to look
into that letter, and there take the notion of comparing the forces of the
planets arising from their circular motion; and so what he wrote to me
afterward about the rate of gravity might be nothing but the fruit of my
own garden."
In replying to this letter Dr. Halley assured him that Hooke's "manner of
claiming the discovery had been represented to him in worse colors than
it ought, and that he neither made public application to the society for
justice nor pretended that you had all from him." The effect of this
assurance was to make Newton regret that he had written the angry
postscript to his letter; and in replying to Halley on July 14, 1686, he
not only expresses his regret, but recounts the different new ideas which
he had acquired from Hooke's correspondence, and suggests it as the best
method "of compromising the present dispute" to add a _scholium_ in which
Wren, Hooke, and Halley are acknowledged to have independently deduced the
law of gravity from the second law of Kepler.
At the meeting of April 28th, at which the manuscript of the _Principia_
was presented to the Royal Society, it was agreed that the printing of
it should be referred to the council: that a letter of thanks should be
written to its author; and at a meeting of the council on May 19th it was
resolved that the manuscript should be printed at the society's expense,
and that Dr. Halley should superintend it while going through the press.
These resolutions were communicated by Dr. Halley in a letter dated May
22d; and in Newton's reply on June 20th, already mentioned, he makes the
following observations:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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