Newton Letters Research Articles

Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton and the Royal Society: three unnoticed letters at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

This article brings attention to three manuscript letters by Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton in the Darmstaedter collection at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, two of which are published here for the first time. Of principal interest is a 1678 letter from Hooke to Newton, which concerns the controversy with Anthony Lucas over Newton's prism experiments and Hooke's disinclination ‘to print transactions’ on behalf of the Royal Society. A second Hooke letter, written to the French savant Nicolas Toinard in 1680, sends some astronomical observations together with English mathematician Robert Wood's book on a proposed calendrical reform. While the text of the third item, a 1706 letter by Newton welcoming its addressee into the Royal Society, has long been available in draft form, the Darmstaedter manuscript allows the recipient to be identified as a Savoyard diplomat, the Comte de Briançon, who can further be recognized as the intended addressee of another Newton letter.

GOD OF THE GAPS OR THE GOD OF “DESIGN AND DOMINION”? RE‐VISITING NEWTON'S THEOLOGY

AbstractStarting with Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton's theology has often been caricatured as putting forward a “God of the gaps” argument for God's existence and continued involvement in the world. Peter Harrison has pointed out that this characterization of Newton's theology is “not entirely clear.” A closer look at Newton's letters and the drafts to the Opticks reveals that, rather than arguing God's providential ordering and care over the world, he takes these for granted and is reluctant to specify instances of this order and care based on his physical research. He certainly believes in gaps in mechanical causes but is more eager to fill those gaps with nonmechanical natural causes than with God. Further, his system does not exhibit the two most prevalent weaknesses attributed to “God of the gaps” theologies: (1) that by describing God as intervening in natural causes his skill as a designer is maligned and (2) that by describing the physical details of God's involvement in the world one puts too much weight on theories likely to be replaced as science advances. Newton avoids the former weakness because it is only God's masterfulness as designer that he ties in any way to his theories of the physical world. He avoids the latter because he never points to God as the direct cause of any specific physical processes. Newton hoped that his system would cause his readers to marvel not only at God's providence but also at humankind's inability to sufficiently understand it.

ПОЭТИКА ЗАГЛАВИЯ ПОВЕСТИ ДЖОНА БЭНВИЛЛА «ПИСЬМО НЬЮТОНА»

The article examines the poetics of the title of John Banville’s novella “The NewtonLetter” (1982). There is a fundamental difference between this text and other novels included in the “scientific trilogy” of the writer, dedicated to the great geniuses of science: elements of a selfreflexive narrative, an introduction of an unreliable narrator-biographer, a departure from the main plot of the biography of the scientist). “The Newton Letter” appears as a postmodernist embodiment of epistemological and ontological doubt, a detailed self-reflection about the crisis of narration and nomination. The very act of writing a letter in its personal dimension emphasizes Banville’s recognition of the incomprehensible complexity of the orders of the universe, the chaotic mundane experience, the strangeness of human relations, and the impenetrability of the consciousness of the Other, as opposed to well-reasoned scientific report. The figures associated with the plot of the creative crisis are the narratorBanville; the narrator-Newton; Newton-Chandos; at different textual levels they all are expressing a deep language skepticism in the form of a letter.

‘The Answer … is Yes and No’: John Banville, Henry James, and The Ambassadors

Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century fiction has witnessed a surge of interest in Henry James, his life and works. Most of these recent Jamesian (re-)engagements are concerned with the body, with James's (still) questionable homosexuality, or with his direct involvement in the literary marketplace. John Banville's 1984 novella, The Newton Letter, is a literary forerunner of this renewed preoccupation with James and Jamesian concerns in contemporary fiction. Differing from more recent novels such as Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004) and David Lodge's Author, Author (2004), Banville's engagement with James does not centre around the portrayal of sexuality or accrued literary/monetary capital. Rather, Banville follows James in his concern with unstable and indeterminate meaning. This essay establishes that indeterminacy through an investigation of the novella's rich textual and intertextual archive. Hitherto critics have commonly assumed the novella's intertextual centre to lie in the works of Hugo von Hoffmanstahl and Wolfgang Goethe. By uncovering its composition history and studying the unpublished materials relating to the project, this essay demonstrates Banville's ongoing engagement with Jamesian concerns, most importantly with tropes of reading and/or writing, and the construction of subjectivity through these tropes.

John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo , Crime, Women

John Banville and Benjamin Black: The Mundo, Crime, Women Carol Dell’Amico (bio) Using the pen name Benjamin Black, John Banville began writing crime fiction in 2006. By that time his career as a writer of prose fiction reached back over thirty-five years. Banville’s first published work was a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin (1970), after which two novels, Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973), followed. At this point Banville began writing novels in series, completing two tetralogies: the so-called “science” novels (1976–86) and the “art” novels (1989–97). The five novels published since the tetralogies (2000–12), while not presented as a series, also share key elements and dominant themes with his previous work, and each of the three series also contains a distinct trilogy. A novelist who has been writing in a series-within-series format for over three decades, Banville characteristically writes self-referentially by constructing texts out of canonical borrowings—some of which repeat across the fiction—and by using a form of mimicry. Indeed, most of Banville’s writing is profoundly intra- and intertextual, and the intertextualism is of a kind and extent that enables it to cancel the usual mechanism of allusion and to render the citations original in meaning and effect. Though Banville’s reputation has grown steadily over the years, his work has not lacked critics, especially those who have questioned the issues of gender the fiction has raised. This essay suggests that the highly successful work of Benjamin Black has not only secured for its author a prominent place among current writers of Irish crime fiction, but it also invites intertexual analysis as a form of engagement both with Banville’s earlier work and with those critics who have viewed negatively the author’s articulation of questions of gender in the novels. [End Page 106] The Fiction of John Banville Banville’s series begin with the science novels, which explore connections between science and art and focus on imaginative leaps of scientific discovery and artistic creation. The series opens with Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), fictional biographies of Nicolas Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, while the third, The Newton Letter: An Interlude (1982), concerns an historian of science unable to finish his book on Isaac Newton. Mefisto (1986), the phantasmagoric concluding novel with a young prodigy as protagonist, is a bridging text to the series to follow. The trilogy embedded in Banville’s second tetralogy of art novels, so-called for the central place of paintings within them, shares a common protagonist: the books’ narrator, Frederick (Freddie) Montgomery, who murders a woman, is thrown into jail, and attempts to redeem himself and to atone for his crime.1 In The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995), Banville’s treatment of the imagination shifts from a focus on its “revolutionary” capacities to its susceptibility to fantasy, with Freddie’s crime following from a “failure of the imagination” and a failure to grasp the personhood of the woman he kills (215).2 That this crime underpins the trilogy points to the ethical content of the series as a whole, and has resulted in a new ethos-focused thread in the criticism of Banville’s work.3 The Untouchable (1997), the final work of the art tetralogy, is a fictionalized biography of Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, who was unmasked in 1979 as the fourth Cambridge spy working for the Soviet Union. A bridging novel, like Mefisto it looks forward to Banville’s new exploratory focus on death, grieving, and loss through the Cleave characters that are present in the third trilogy (Eclipse, Shroud 2002, Ancient Light 2012) and in the other two books of the final series, The Sea (2005) and The Infinities (2009). The startling discipline of Banville’s work has elicited Violeta Delgado Crespo’s likening of Banville to Wallace Stevens, who thought of [End Page 107] his writing as his poetic mundo, a personal expressive system of modulating themes, symbols, and concepts that he developed over the course of his career (Crespo 306).4 Banville’s copiously plundered material—tropes, scenes, and voices—is adapted from canonical...

"What Then Would Life Be but Despair?": Skepticism and Romanticism in John Banville's Doctor Copernicus

-T _o chart the development of modern science in the form and content of the postmodern novel-this is the project John Banville boldly embarked upon with his 1979 novel Doctor Copernicus. The project entailed a stylistic as well as a thematic challenge, since Banville sought portray the men and their times and illustrate something of their ideas by an orchestration of formal movement and rhythm in the prose (Physics 42). The four books he envisaged, moreover, were to take the strict form of a classical Greek tetralogy, with The Newton Letter functioning as the satiric interlude (My Readers 12). Even though Banville did not stick to the historical aspect of his projectthe men and their times-after this novella, the four novels that constitute the science tetralogy-Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter, and Mefisto-do form a closely knit structure.1

Further Newton correspondence

It is very unlikely that a group of thirty unknown ‘Newton letters’ will ever appear again. The group itself we recorded in vol. VII of The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (p. 357) when its whereabouts were unknown to us; it had been sold as Lot 129 in the great Sotheby sale of 1936. The purchaser was Dr Erik Waller, after whose death the letters passed with the rest of his collection into the Library of the University of Uppsala, which kindly supplied photocopies of them. I am very grateful to Mr Andrew Brown of the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, who brought these letters to my attention. In fact, only two of them (X.984 and X .i342.1) are from ‘Newton’s pen’— and both of these are copies; these only, together with the Newtonian drafts from the Cambridge University Library here added to. the Uppsala letters for the sake of completeness (all of these drafts having been discovered by Dr Whiteside) I have printed here as accurately as possible. The letters to Newton in the Uppsala group, for the most part in Latin, I have reproduced in English, often severely abbreviated. Many of them are no more than letters of thanks for copies of Opticks, or for election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.

Newton's Letters Completed: The Correspondence of Isaac Newton . Vols. 6 and 7. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling, Eds. Published for the Royal Society by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1976 and 1978. Vol. 6, 1713-1718. xl, 500 Pp. $65. Vol. 7, 1718-1727. xlviii, 522 pp. $65.

Newton's Letters Completed: <i>The Correspondence of Isaac Newton</i> . Vols. 6 and 7. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling, Eds. Published for the Royal Society by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1976 and 1978. Vol. 6, 1713-1718. xl, 500 Pp. $65. Vol. 7, 1718-1727. xlviii, 522 pp. $65.

Newton's Letters Continued: The Correspondence of Isaac Newton . Vol. 5, 1709-1713. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling, Eds. Published for the Royal Society by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1975. liv, 440 pp. $55.

Newton's Letters Continued: <i>The Correspondence of Isaac Newton</i> . Vol. 5, 1709-1713. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling, Eds. Published for the Royal Society by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1975. liv, 440 pp. $55.

Newton's Letters Continued

Newton's Letters Continued

Newton's Letters Continued: The Correspondence of Isaac Newton . Vol. 5, 1709-1713. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling, Eds. Published for the Royal Society by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1975. liv, 440 pp. $55.

Newton's Letters Continued: <i>The Correspondence of Isaac Newton</i> . Vol. 5, 1709-1713. A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling, Eds. Published for the Royal Society by Cambridge University Press, New York, 1975. liv, 440 pp. $55.

The Newton letters (Vols. I and II)

(1960). The Newton letters (Vols. I and II) Annals of Science: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 117-124.

Newton's Letters

IN Osiris (7, 523–555; 1939) M. Jean Polseneer, whose interest in the subject is well known, has reproduced some nine letters from Newton's unpublished correspondence. Four documents are shown in reduced facsimile, and all are accompanied by explanatory notes. The first four letters, between Newton and Oldenburg, are taken from the Portsmouth Collection in the University Library, Cambridge. The next two, between Newton and Hooke, are in the Library of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania at Philadelpliia. Of all these the main theme is optical. Two other letters between Newton and Hooke come from the Pierpont Morgan Library in Now York; their subject-matter is of very minor interest. For the period covered by these eight letters (1672–78) little original material bearing on Newton's life has been published. The ninth document is a joint report signed by Newton and Halley on the performance of a magnetic needle. This is an official paper dated 1712, and preserved in the Public Record Office. It is two years since M. Pelseneer, writing in Giel et Terre, pointed out with a reference to Stukeloy's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, edited by A. H. White and then lately published, that the story of Newton and the apple certainly did not originate in the fertile imagination of Voltaire.

Mr. H. O. Forbes's Discoveries in the Chatham Islands

IN reply to Prof. Newton's letter, under the above title, in NATURE of last week (p. 101), in which he refers to the description by me of the Chatham Island Ralline bones under a distinct genus Diaphorapteryx, and observes “that one thing seems needed to make the discussion [on the probability of a land connection between the Chatham and Mascarene Islands] real, and that is the proof of the assertion that Aphanapteryx ever inhabited the Chatham Islands,” I beg to say that in his letter there is a slight confusion of dates, which affects the question of the nomenclature. On July 29 last year I visited Cambridge for the purpose of comparing the bones from the Chatham Islands I had brought with me with the real Aphanapteryx remains in the Museum there. It turned out that Dr. Gadow, who was abroad, had laid them aside where Prof. Newton could not place his hand upon them, and I was, therefore, unable to see them. A week or two later, when in Edinburgh at the British Association Meeting, in a note intimating the return of Dr. Gadow, and kindly arranging for my examination of the bones, Prof. Newton adds, “I believe you will want a new generic name for what you have called Aphanapteryx” and suggests the name Diaphorapteryx instead. I was unavoidably long prevented from revisiting the Cambridge Museum, and so in describing as Diaphorapteryx the Chatham Island bones, at a meeting of the British Ornithologists' Club in December, 1892, I accepted the suggestion of Prof. Newton, who alone had till then seen the remains from both localities. On February 23, prior to reading my paper at the Royal Geographical Society, I again visited Cambridge, and in the most kind manner received every facility and assistance both from the Professor and from Dr. Gadow in comparing the specimens. On this occasion I was unable to recognise any sufficient characters, by which, in my estimation, to separate generically the bones from the Chatham Islands from those from Mauritius. This decision I stated at the meeting of the R.G.S. on March 13 last, and more recently in a communication to the Brit. Ornith. Club, which will appear in its forthcoming Bulletin. If I mistake not, however, Prof. Newton agreed with me that the Chatham Island form was nearer to Aphanapteryx than the latter was to Erythromachus of Rodriguez. Some of these remains from Mauritius have been figured by Prof. Milne-Edwards in his “Oiseaux Fossiles de France,” and the remainder are fully discussed and illustrated by Dr. Gadow in a shortly-to-be-issued fasciculus of the Trans.Z.S. of London, while those from the Chatham Islands will appear shortly, I hope, in one or other of the scientific journals or Proceedings. After a careful study of all the material I have no hesitation, however, in stating meantime—as those who care will then have an opportunity of judging—that the bones from both regions are generically the same. I maintain also, that even if some osteologists should be disposed (from the somewhat larger size of the Chatham Island bones, though among them I found a number scarcely to be separated on even that ground) to make a generic distinction between them, the question would not only not fall, but I really cannot see that the argument based on their discovery in the New Zealand region would be in the least invalidated, as the forms are unquestionably so very nearly related. The importance of the distribution of the blue Water-hens, and the relationship between the Huias of New Zealand and the Frigelupus of Reunion—long ago pointed out by Mr. Wallace—and many other facts as far as birds are concerned recently urged by Dr. Sharpe at the Royal Institution, appears now to a fuller extent by the discovery of those unexpected forms in the Chatham Islands.

Bison and Aurochs

IN regard to Prof. Newton's letter in your issue of the 8th, I beg to state that in restricting the name aurochs to the European bison, I have merely followed the general custom of English zoologists.

IV.—The Faunas of the Ffynnon Beuno Caves, and of the Norfolk Forest Bed

From Mr. Newton's letter in the February Number of the GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE, I am inclined to think that he has somewhat misunderstood my meaning where I referred to the fauna of the Norfolk Forest Bedinmy paper in the December Number. Prof. Hughes had stated in his paper that the bones from the caverns “belong to the newer group of animals found elsewhere in undoubtedly Post-Glæial river deposits.” As Mr. Newton admits “that most of these species have been found in the Pre-Glacial Forest Bed of Norfolk, and it is probable that others of them will yet be found,” it is clear that I was correct in my contention that “a very large proportion of the animals occur in the Norfolk Forest Bed.”

Zoological Geography—Didus and Didunculus

MY use of the expression “a near congener” seems, from Prof. Newton's letter in your number of July 4, to have diverted attention from the point to which I desired to direct it.

An extract of Mr. Isaac Newton's letter, written to the published from Cambridge April 3.1673. concerning the number of colors, and the necessity of mixing them all for the production of white ; as also touching the cause why a picture cast by glasses into a darkned room appears so distinct notwithstanding its irregular refraction: (which letter, being an immediat

It seems to me, that N . takes an improper way of examining the nature of Colors , whilst he proceeds upon compounding those that are already compounded ; as he doth in the former part of his Letter.

Mr. Newton's letter to the publisher of March 26. 1672. containing some more suggestions about his new telescope, and a table of apertures and charges for the several lengths of that instrument

Sir, Since my last Letter I have further compared the two Telescopes, and find that of Metal to represent as well the Moon, as neerer Object; something distincter than the other.