Newton and the Counterfeiter (39 page)

[>]
 "a little way of in the country": The recollection of James Stirling, cited in ibid., p. 866.
a visitor came to call: See Zachary Pearce's recollection of his visit with Newton in ibid., p. 869.
The illness persisted: For a fuller account of Newton's last days, see ibid., pp. 863–70.
"only like a boy playing": Reported in Joseph Spence,
Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of books and Men,
p. 54. It has been repeated throughout the Newton literature and is,
inter alia,
reprinted in
Never at Rest,
p. 863.

[>]
 "If you doubt there was such a man": The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century view of Newton as an angelic figure, an intermediary between God and the created universe, is beautifully analyzed in Simon Schaffer's draft chapter "Newtonian Angels"—in its entirety for the larger question, pp. 8–9 for the Fatio-Conduitt communication.

N
EWTON'S
C
ORRESPONDENCE AND
M
ANUSCRIPTS

Almost all of the known letters to and from Isaac Newton have been collected in
The Correspondence of Isaac Newton.
Seven volumes, edited by H. W. Turnbull, J. F. Scott, A. R. Hall, and Laura Tilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Society, 1959–1977. (A few letters still turn up, including, recently, a handful between Newton and Fatio exchanged long after the break in their relationship in 1693.)

Newton's manuscripts are widely scattered. For this book the most important archive is held at the National Archives, in Kew, England. Newton's holograph Mint records are in six folios, Mint 19/1–6. The depositions taken in his presence are collected in Mint 17.

Other important locations for Newton documents include Kings College, Cambridge; the Cambridge University Library; the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem (home of many of Newton's theological papers); the Bodleian Library and the Burndy Library collection, now housed at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. I tracked these collections bibliographically and online, and consulted the documents housed in them as needed for this book through two main off-site routes.

The first was through the work of the Newton Project, which can be found at
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1
. The project has published a wide-ranging selection of Newton's original writings, adding translations as necessary. Of special value to me were the transcriptions of all of Newton's surviving early notebooks. The collection also offers a very valuable set of accounts of Newton by contemporary or nearcontemporary observers. Several of Newton's reports as Master of the Mint of significance to the conversion from a silver to a gold standard are available online at
http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1701-25-mint-reports.html#masters
.

Last, the Harvard University Library holds a copy of the hard-to-find Chadwyck Healy microfilm edition of
Sir Isaac Newton, 1642–1727: Manuscripts and Papers,
edited with a finding aid written by Peter Jones:
Sir Isaac Newton: A Catalogue of Manuscripts and Papers.
The edition contains photographs of the bulk of Newton's manuscript output from 1660 on. It is not quite complete, but it is the nearest thing to a comprehensive collection in existence. It is not what you would call easy to use, as the quality of the photographs varies enormously, but I found it an invaluable resource.

N
EWTON'S
P
UBLISHED
B
OOKS

The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
Translated by

I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Opticks.
New York: Dover, 1952 (preface by I. B. Cohen, c. 1979).

The Cohen and Whitman edition of the
Principia
remains the definitive choice for readers of English for three reasons. The translation itself is admirably clear and transparent to Newton's argument; the design of the edition does everything it can to make this dense material as easy to follow as possible; and above all, Cohen's guide to Newton's text, a book-length work in its own right, is invaluable. Other editions have come out since, but accept no substitutes. My copy of
Opticks
is the one with Albert Einstein's charming, brief tribute to Newton.

B
IOGRAPHIES

Brewster, Sir David.
The Life of Sir Isaac Newton,
revised and edited by W. T. Lynn. London: Gall & Inglis, 1875.

Craig, Sir John.
Newton at the Mint.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.

Fara, Patricia.
Newton: The Making of a Genius.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Gleick, James.
Isaac Newton.
New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

Hall, A. Rupert.
Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992.

Manuel, Frank.
A Portrait of Isaac Newton.
Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979.

Westfall, Richard S.
Never at Rest.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

White, Michael.
Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer.
New York: Basic Books, 1999.

At different times in the course of this project I consulted a wide range of biographies. Like most writers on Newton since 1980, I am most deeply indebted to Richard Westfall's scholarly, accessible, and comprehensive biography. Westfall is one of the giants without whom this book could not have been written. The best short introduction to Newton's life and work is James Gleick's brief life. It is beautifully written and provides a very clear account of what it was that Newton did that makes him still so important; Gleick also manages to convey the context of Newton's life and times in an extremely concise package. Frank Manuel's
Portrait
was the book that got me started on this project; in it he quotes Chaloner's last letter to Newton, and when I first read it, almost twenty years ago, it left a question—What on earth was Newton doing in contact with a condemned coiner?—that this book attempts to answer. Craig's
Newton at the Mint
is the only book-length study of that period of Newton's life; it touches on Newton's tenure as Warden only briefly, but still, it's all there was. Fara's and Hall's works are aimed more at a professional audience than the lay public; both are full of valuable insights. Brewster's massive account is as much a historical document—an illustration of Victorian priorities—as it is a currently useful account of Newton. I don't always agree with Michael White's emphases, but it was the first popular Newton biography that I'm aware of to focus on what has been of scholarly interest for some time—the connection between the long-ignored history of Newton's alchemical work and his more "respectable" interests in what we now call science.

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———
.
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———.
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