WOOLSTHORPE. THE NEWTON CHAPEL contains a sundial with an inscription, which says that it was cut by Newton when a boy of nine. His baptism appears in the Register thus:—"Isaac son of Isaac and Hanna Newton Jan[ry] 1, 1643." She was an Ayscough, and married for her second husband the Rev. Barnabas Smith of North Wytham. On the left bank of the Witham, at a distance of half a mile, is the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, which must not be confused with the Woolsthorpe near Belvoir. The name was probably Wolph's or Ulfsthorpe, and nothing to do with Wool. In Domesday Book it is Ulstanthorp. In Woolsthorpe Manor House Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1641. The window is shown from which he saw the apple fall and the Newton Arms—two cross-bones—are sculptured over the door. In the days of the Commonwealth he was at Bishop Fox's school at Grantham, 1651-1656. His mother thought to make a farmer of him, but kindly fate took him to Cambridge when he was eighteen, and he spent more than four years there, taking his degree in 1665. The incident of the apple dates from 1666, the year of the great Plague and the Fire of London. Starting from this he deduced the reasons for the movement of the planets which Galileo in 1610 and Copernicus in 1540 had noted. He had by this time accumulated much of the material for his great work the "Principia," and for the next thirty years he worked and wrote unceasingly. He was appointed Master of the Mint in 1695, and President of the Royal Society in 1703, and was knighted in 1705. He died in March, 1727. His own view of his life's work may be given in his own words: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." After lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the Lord Chancellor, two dukes, and three earls being pall-bearers; his monument, near the entrance to the choir on the north side, shows a recumbent figure with the right arm on four folios named Divinity, Chronology, Optics, and Phil. Prin. Math. Above is a large globe showing the planets, etc., projecting from a pyramid, and on the globe the figure of Astronomy with a closed book, in a very pensive mood. Below is a bas-relief representing Newton's various labours and discoveries.
