The celebrated Marquis de la Place viewed the illness of Newton in a light still more painful to his friends. He maintained that he never recovered the vigour of his intellect, and he was persuaded that Newton’s theological inquiries did not commence till after that afflicting epoch of his life. He even commissioned Professor Gautier of Geneva to make inquiries on this subject during his visit to England, as if it concerned the interests of truth and justice to show that Newton became a Christian and a theological writer only after the decay of his strength and the eclipse of his reason. Such having been the consequences of the disclosure of Newton’s illness by the manuscript of Huygens, I felt it to be a sacred duty to the memory of that great man, to the feelings of his countrymen, and to the interests of Christianity itself, to inquire into the nature and history of that indisposition which seems to have been so much misrepresented and misapplied. From the ignorance of so extraordinary an event which has prevailed for such a long period in England, it might have been urged with some plausibility that Huygens had mistaken the real import of the information that was conveyed to him; or that the Scotchman from whom he received it had propagated an idle and a groundless rumour. But we are, fortunately, not confined to this very reasonable mode of defence. There exists at Cambridge a manuscript journal written by Mr. Abraham de la Pryme, who was a student in the university while Newton was a fellow of Trinity. This manuscript is entitled “_Ephemeris Vitæ_, or Diary of my own Life, containing an account likewise of the most observable and remarkable things that I have taken notice of from my youth up hitherto.” Mr. de la Pryme was born in 1671, and begins the diary in 1685. This manuscript is in the possession of his collateral descendant, George Pryme, Esq., Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, to whom I have been indebted for the following extract.