[6] “One of his uncles,” says M. Biot, “having one day found him under a hedge with a book in his hand and entirely absorbed in meditation, took it from him, and found that he was occupied in the solution of a mathematical problem. Struck with finding so serious and so active a disposition at so early an age, he urged his mother no longer to thwart him, and to send him back to Grantham to continue his studies.” I have omitted this anecdote in the text, as I cannot find it in Turner’s Collections, from which M. Biot derived his details of Newton’s infancy, nor in any other work. [7] Pemberton’s _View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy_. Pref. [8] Peregregiæ vir indolis ac insignis peritiæ.—_Epist ad. Lect._ [9] See Newton’s Letter to the Abbé Conti, dated February 26, 1715–16, in the _Additamenta Comm. Epistolici_. [10] Newtoni _Opera_, tom. iv. p. 205, Letter to Oldenburg. [11] M. Biot, in his Life of Newton, has stated that Newton was preceded in the invention of the reflecting telescope by Gregory, _but probably without knowing it_. It is quite certain, however, that Newton was acquainted with Gregory’s invention, as appears from the following avowal of it. “When I first applied myself to try the effects of reflection, Mr. Gregory’s _Optica Promota_ (printed in the year 1663) having fallen into my hands, where there is an instrument described with a hole in the midst of the object-glass, to transmit the light to an eye-glass placed behind it, I had thence an occasion of considering that sort of construction, and found their disadvantages so great, that I saw it necessary before I attempted any thing in the practice to alter the design of them, and place the eye-glass at the side of the tube rather than at the middle.”—_Letter to Oldenburg_, May 4th, 1672. [12] Letter to Oldenburg, February 10, 1671. [13] This gentleman was the author of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions, entitled “Optical Assertions concerning the Rainbow.” How such a paper could be published by so learned a body seems in the present day utterly incomprehensible. The dials which Linus erected at Liege, and which were the originals of those formerly in the Priory Gardens in London, are noticed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1703. In one of them the hours were distinguished by touch. [14] Newton speaks with singular positiveness on this subject. “For _I know_,” says he, “that Mr. Lucas’s observations _cannot hold_ where the refracting angle of the prism is full 60°, and the day is clear, and the full length of the colours is measured, and the breadth of the image answers to the sun’s diameter; and seeing I am well assured of the truth and exactness of my own observations, I shall be unwilling to be diverted by any other experiments from having a fair end made of this in the first place.” On the supposition that his prism was one of very low dispersive power, Mr. Lucas might, with perfect truth, have used the very same language towards Newton.