influence mankind to the end of the world, yet it must be admitted that Pope's lines are only a "poetic fancy":—
"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said, 'Let Newton be,' and all was light."
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was born at Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, the same year in which Galileo died. At his birth he was so small and weak that his life was despaired of. His mother sent him at an early age to a village school, and in his twelfth year to the public school at Grantham. At first he seems to have been very inattentive to his studies and very low in the school; but when, one day, the little Isaac received a severe kick upon his stomach from a boy who was above him, he laboured hard till he ranked higher in school than his antagonist. From that time he continued to rise until he was the head boy.[33] At Grantham, Isaac showed a decided taste for mechanical inventions. He constructed a water-clock, a wind-mill, a carriage moved by the person who sat in it, and other toys. When he had attained his fifteenth year his mother took him home to assist her in the management of the farm, but his great dislike for farm-work and his irresistible passion for study, induced her to send him back to Grantham, where he remained till his eighteenth year, when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge (1660). Cambridge was the real birthplace of Newton's genius. Some idea of his strong intuitive powers may be drawn from the fact that he regarded the theorems of ancient geometry as self-evident truths, and that, without any preliminary study, he made himself master of Descartes' Geometry. He afterwards regarded this neglect of elementary geometry a mistake in his mathematical studies, and he expressed to Dr. Pemberton his regret that "he had applied himself to the works of Descartes and other algebraic writers before he had
