plating by what steps he ascended. Tracing his course of action may help others to gain the lower eminences lying within their reach, while admiration excited and curiosity satisfied are frames of mind both wholesome and pleasing. Nothing new, it is true, can be given in narrative, hardly anything in reflection, less still perhaps in comment or illustration; but it is well to assemble in one view various parts of the vast subject, with the surrounding circumstances, whether accidental or intrinsic, and to mark in passing the misconceptions raised by individual ignorance or national prejudice which the historian of science occasionally finds crossing his path.

The remark is common and is obvious, that the genius of Newton did not manifest itself at a very early age. His faculties were not, like those of some great and many ordinary individuals, precociously developed. Among the former, Clairant stands preeminent, who at 19 years of age presented to the Royal Academy a memoir of great originality upon a difficult subject in the higher geometry, and at 18 published his great work on curves of double curvature, composed during the two preceding years. Pascal, too, at 16, wrote an excellent treatise on conic sections. That Newton cannot be ranked in this respect with those extraordinary persons, is owing to the accidents which prevented him from entering upon mathematical study before his 18th year; and then a much greater marvel was wrought than even the Clairants and the Pascals displayed. His ear

liest history is involved in some obscurity, and the most celebrated of men has, in this particular, been compared to the most celebrated of rivers (the Nile), as if the course of both in its feebler state had been concealed from mortal eyes.

We have it, however, well ascertained that within four years, between the age of 18 and 22, he had begun to study mathematic science, and had taken his place among its greatest masters; learnt for the first

which Descartes could not attempt; and it is remarkable that Cavalleri regarded curves as polygons, surfaces as composed of lines, while Roberval viewed geometrical quantities as generated by motion; so that the one approached to the differential calculus, the other to fluxions; and Fermat, in the interval between them, comes still nearer the great discovery by his determination of maxima and minima, and his drawing of tangents. More recently Hudden had made public similar methods invented by Schoetin; and what is material, treating the subject alge braically, while those just now mentioned had rather dealt with it geometrically.

It is thus easy to perceive how near an approach had been made to the calculus before the great event of its final discovery. There had in like manner been approaches made to the law of gravitation, and the dynamical system of the universe. Galileo's important propositions on motion, especially on cur vilinear motion, and Kepler's laws upon the elliptical form of the planetary orbits, the proportion of the areas to the times, and of the periodic times to the mean distances; and Huygens's theorems on centrifugal forces, had been followed by still nearer approaches to the doctrine of attraction. Borelli had distinctly ascribed the motion of satellites to their being drawn towards the principal planets, and thus prevented from fiving off by the centrifugal force. Even the composition of white light, and the different action of bodies upon its component parts, had been vaguely conjectured by, Ant, de Dominis, archbishop of Spalatro, at the beginning, and more precisely in the raiddle, of the 17th century by Marcus (Kronland, of Prague), unknown to Newton, who only refers to the archbishop's work; while the treatise of Huygens on light, Grimaldi's observations on colours by inflexion, as well as on the elongation of the image in the prismatic spectrum, had been brought to his attention, although much less near to his own great discovery

valuable step of reducing to a system the method of investigation adopted by those eminent men, generalizing it, and extending its application to all matters of contingent truth, exploding the errors, the absurd dogmas, and fantastic subtleties of the ancient schools, above all, confining the subject of our inquiry, and the manner of conducting it, within the limits which our faculties prescribe. Nor is this great law of gradual progress contiued to the physical sciences; in the moral it equally governs. Before the foundations of political economy were laid by Hume and Smith, a great step had been made by the French philosophers, disciples of Quesnai; but a nearer approach to sound principles had signalized the labours of Gournay, and those labours had been shared and his doctrines patronized by Turgot, when chief

minister.

Again, in constitutional policy, see by what slow degrees, from its first rude elements, the attendance of feudal tenants at their lord's court, and the summons of burghers, to grant supplies of money, the great discovery of modern times in the science of practical politics has been effected, the representative scheme which enables States of any extent to enjoy popular government, and allows mixed monarchy to be established, combining freedom with order—a plan pronounced by the statesmen and writers of antiquity to be of hardly possible formation, and wholly impossible continuance, The globe itself, as well as the science of its inhabitants, has been explored aceor ling to the law which forbids a sudden and rapid leaping forward, and decrees that each successive step, pr pared by the last, shall facilitate the next. Even Cubus followed several successful discoverers on a smaller scale, and is by some believed to have hai, unknown to him, a predecessor in the great explit by which he pierced the night of ages, and untled a new worl 1 to the eyes of the old. The arts afford no exception to the general law. Demos