Book Reviews: The preliminary manuscripts for Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia 1684-1685. Facsimiles of the original autographs, now in Cambridge University Library , with an introduction by D.T. Whiteside

Abstract

The preliminary manuscripts for Isaac Newton's 1687 1684-1685. Facsimiles of the original autographs, now in Cambridge University , with an introduction by D.T. Whiteside. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xxi + 246. £60. ISBN 0-521-33499-3. How vastly Newtonian studies have changed in less than half a century! In 1947, a jejune research student, I made a first daring reconnaissance into those Newton manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library which, together with those dispersed in 1936 (and now largely in academic keeping), have since so vastly enriched our knowledge of the greatest of all scientific figures readily accessible to us, nay, the greatest of all. The most important of the manuscripts in this vast body of material are here reproduced in excellent photographic facsimile under the direction of Professor Whiteside. I do not know who before myself had troubled the peace of the Principia papers since they had been (sparingly) catalogued by a committee of distinguished Cambridge scientists in the 1880s. Certainly not Louis Trenchard More, whose biography of Newton appeared in 1934. Only W.W. Rouse Ball had long before looked into the Portsmouth Collection so that his Essay on Newton's Principia (1893) remained for many years the sole important addition to Principia manuscript studies since the publications of Rigaud, Edleston and Brewster.