Although an attempt has been recently made to place the conduct of Leibnitz on the same level with that of Newton, yet the circumstances of the case will by no means justify such a comparison. The conduct of Newton was at all times dignified and just. He knew his rights, and he boldly claimed them. Conscious of his integrity, he spurned with indignation the charge of plagiarism with which an ungenerous rival had so insidiously loaded him; and if there was one step in his frank and unhesitating procedure which posterity can blame it is his omission, in the third edition of the Principia, of the references to the differential calculus of Leibnitz. This omission, however, was perfectly just. The scholium which he had left out was a mere historical statement of the fact, that the German mathematician had sent him a method which was the same as his own; and when he found that this simple assertion had been held by Leibnitz and others as a recognition of his independent claim to the invention, he was bound either to omit it altogether, or to enter into explanations which might have involved him in a new controversy. The conduct of Leibnitz was not marked with the same noble lineaments. That he was the aggressor is universally allowed. That he first dared to breathe the charge of plagiarism against Newton, and that he often referred to it, has been sufficiently apparent; and when arguments failed him he had recourse to threats—declaring that he would publish another Commercium Epistolicum, though he had no appropriate letters to produce. All this is now matter of history; and we may find some apology for it in his excited feelings, and in the insinuations which were occasionally thrown out against the originality of his discovery; but for other parts of his conduct we seek in vain for an excuse. When he assailed the philosophy of Newton in his letters to the Abbé Conti, he exhibited perhaps only the petty feelings of a rival; but when he dared to calumniate that great man in his correspondence with the Princess of Wales, by whom he was respected and beloved; when he ventured to represent the Newtonian philosophy as physically false, and as dangerous to religion; and when he founded these accusations on passages in the Principia and the Optics glowing with all the fervour of genuine piety, he cast a blot upon his name, which all his talents as a philosopher, and all his virtues as a man, will never be able to efface. CHAPTER XIII.