Transactions, in 1742. The instrument was the same as that produced by Mr. Hadley, in 1731, and which, under the name of Hadley's Quadrant, has been of so great use in navigation. On the assembling of the new Parliament, in 1701, Newton was re-elected one of the members for the University of Cambridge. In 1703, he was chosen President of the Royal Society of London, to which office he was annually re-elected till the period of his decease—about twenty-five years afterward.
Our author unquestionably devoted more labour to, and, in many respects, took a greater pride in his Optical, than his other discoveries. This science he had placed on a new and indestructible basis; and he wished not only to build, but to perfect the costly and glowing structure. He had communicated, before the publication of the Principia, his most important researches on light to the Royal Society, in detached papers which were inserted in successive numbers of the Transactions; but he did not publish a connected view of these labours till 1704, when they appeared under the title of Optics: or, a Treatise on the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. To this, but to no subsequent edition, were added two Mathematical Treatises, entitled, Tractatus duo de speciebus et magnitudine figurarum curvilinearum; the one bearing the title Tractatus de quadratura curvarum; and the other, that of Enumeratio linearum tertii ordinis. The publication of these Mathematical Treatises was made necessary in consequence of plagiarisms from the manuscripts of them loaned by the author to his friends. Dr. Samuel Clarke published a Latin translation of the Optics, in in 1706; whereupon he was presented by Newton, as a mark of his grateful approbation, with five hundred pounds, or one hundred pounds for each of his children. The work was afterward translated into French. It had a remarkably wide circulation, and appeared, in several successive editions, both in England and on the Continent. There is displayed, particularly on this Optical Treatise, the author's talent for simplifying and communicating the profoundest speculations. It is a faculty rarely united to that of the highest invention. Newton possessed both; and thus that mental perfectness which enabled him to create, to combine,
