a quadrature. He gives the same or another, I do not know which, in the present work, in which the circle is 315 diameters. This volume is of 981 good folio pages, and treats of all things, mental and material. The author is not at all mad, only wrong on many points. It is the weakness of the orthodox follower of any received system to impute insanity to the solitary dissentient: which is voted (in due time) a very wrong opinion about Copernicus, Columbus, or Galileo, but quite right about Robert Greene, If misconceptions, acted on by too much self-opinion, be sufficient evidence of madness, it would be a curious inquiry what is the least per-centage of the reigning school which has been insane at any one time. Greene is one of the sources for Newton being led to think of gravitation by the fall of an apple: his authority is the gossip of Martin Folkes. Probably Folkes had it from Newton's niece, Mrs. Conduitt, whom Voltaire acknowledges as his authority. It is in the draft found among Conduitt's papers of memoranda to be sent to Fontenelle. But Fontenelle, though a great retailer of anecdote, does not mention it in his éloge of Newton; whence it may be suspected that it was left out in the copy forwarded to France. D'Israeli has got an improvement on the story: the apple 'struck him a smart blow on the head:' no doubt taking him just on the organ of causality. He was 'surprised at the force of the stroke' from so small an apple: but then the apple had a mission; Homer would have said it was Minerva in the form of an apple. 'This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling bodies,' which Galileo had settled long before: 'from whence he deduced the principle of gravity, which many had considered before him, but no one had deduced anything from it. I cannot imagine whence D'Israeli got the rap on the head, I mean got it for Newton: this is very unlike his usual accounts of things. The story is pleasant and possible: its only defect is that various writings, well known to Newton, a very learned mathematician, had given more suggestion than a whole sack of apples could have done, if they had tumbled on that mighty head all at once. And Pemberton, speaking from Newton himself, says nothing more than that the idea of the moon being retained by the same force which causes the fall of bodies struck him for the first time while meditating in a garden. One particular tree at Woolsthorpe has been selected as the gallows of the appleshaped goddess: it died in 1820, and Mr. Turnor kept the wood; but Sir D, Brewster brought away a bit of root in 1814, and must have had it on his conscience for 43 years that he may have killed the tree. Kepler's suggestion of gravitation with the inverse
