chiefly, in the possession of the family of the Earl of Portsmouth, through the Viscountess Lymington.
Everything appertaining to Newton has been kept and cherished with peculiar veneration. Different memorials of him are preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge; in the rooms of the Royal Society, of London: and in the Museum of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The manor-house, at Woolsthorpe, was visited by Dr. Stukeley, in October, 1721, who, in a letter to Dr. Mead, written in 1727, gave the following description of it:—"'Tis built of stone, as is the way of the country hereabouts, and a reasonably good one. They led me up stairs and showed me Sir Isaac's study, where I supposed he studied, when in the country, in his younger days, or perhaps when he visited his mother from the University. I observed the shelves were of his own making, being pieces of deal boxes, which probably he sent his books and clothes down in on those occasions. There were, some years ago, two or three hundred books in it of his father-in-law, Mr. Smith, which Sir Isaac gave to Dr. Newton, of our town." The celebrated appletree, the fall of one of the apples of which is said to have turned the attention of Newton to the subject of gravity, was destroyed by the wind about twenty years ago; but it has been preserved in the form of a chair. The house itself has been protected with religious care. It was repaired in 1798, and a tablet of white marble put up in the room where our author was born, with the following inscription:—
"Sir Isaac Newton, son of John Newton, Lord of the Manor of Woolsthorpe, was born in this room, on the 25th of December, 1642."
| Nature and Nature's Laws were hid in night, God said, "Let Newton be," and all was light. |
