Fellows Of The Royal Society

"These notions Anaximenes received from Anaximander, Anaximander from Thales himself, who was the Head and Founder of the Ionic Philosophy; and spread this opinion of the Gravity of the Fix'd Stars among his Sect."

"But... Kepler’s problem was to be resolved, to find the position of a body moved in an elliptical orbit at a given time. As concerns an algebraic resolution... adapted to the construction of tables, we... also have produced a work not... to be ashamed of."

"Although in every age there have been those who cultivated astronomy, either by... observations... or by theories and systems made up according to the state of understanding of any period, or by a talent for exposition, yet the lucubrations of all these astronomers do not reveal the ways of the heaven any more than they reveal the skill and experience of their progenitors in geometrical matters."

"[T]he easier, simpler and less composite these theories are, the more they will be consonant not only with what has already been observed... but with what is yet to be observed, and with the very machine of the world which was constructed by the supreme creator with the greatest simplicity."

"[W]e do still tread in the steps of the Ancients in this Physical Astronomy; inasmuch as they knew that the Celestial Bodies gravitated towards each other, and were retain'd in their Orbits by the force of Gravity; and were also apprized of the Law of this Gravity."

"But, since the law of centripetal force employed by nature is to be discovered from its symptoms, the indisputably elliptical orbit and the sesquialteral ratio of the periodic times and the distances from the centre of forces, the same great Newton solved not only the universal problem of determining the trajectory and the motion in it for any given centripetal force, but also its converse. After this universal problem had been solved the sequel was to find other [quantities] in the geometric figure that are measures of physical qualities; for example, that the periodic times in ellipses are in the sesquiplicate ratio of the transverse axes [the squares of the times are as the cubes of the axes], and as many other things similar to these as possible. Also, for instance, to compare this force, which we experience in the planets, with another given force near to us, namely gravity. But also the new philosophy was to concern itself with movable elliptical orbits, in which the line of apsides either advances or retires. Also, for instance, a more exact [theory] of rectilinear descent and of the motion of pendulous bodies than the Huygenian one, since that supposes the centre to be infinitely removed. Therefore also, other s different from the common one and variously devised according as the pendulum oscillates inside or outside the surface of the Earth. And let that suffice for this problem. But also on account of the mutual actions of bodies moving around a centre the orbits usually turn out to be deformed, and also an investigation of these actions and of the deformity arising from them, whence arise many minor inequalities of the planets, such as the motion of the nodes, the variation of maximum latitude, and other things in the moon."

"Mr Issac Newton in addition to the geometric figure in any orbit of a projectile sought also to find the measure of the (tending to a given centre) of the body borne in that orbit, from whatever cause that force may arise, be it from a deeper mechanical one or from a law imposed by the supreme creator of all things. He inquires geometrically into the law of centripetal force of a body moved in the circumference of a circle with the force tending to a given point either on the circumference or anywhere outside it or inside it, or even infinitely removed. By the same method he seeks the law of centripetal force tending to the centre of a plane nautical spiral (that is one that the radii cut in a given angle) which will drive a body in that spiral. Also the law of centripetal force that would make a body rotate in an ellipse when the centre of the ellipse coincides with the centre of forces. If the ellipse is changed into a hyperbola and the centripetal force into a centrifugal one the same things apply to the hyperbola. Also the resolution of the same problem when the centre of forces coincides with either focus of the ellipse shows that the law of centripetal force is reciprocally in the duplicate ratio of the distance [as the inverse square of the distance]; others had long before shown that this was the one and only law that would satisfy the other phenomenon observed by Kepler in the motion of the planets. These results also apply to the hyperbola and the parabola when the centre of forces is situated in a focus of the conic section."

"[W]ith this one problem... three years ago, after the above was published, Gottfried Leibniz... produced a construction... in terms of his system—not without the blemish of paralogism."

"Although the celestial spaces in which the planets move around are... unresisting, yet media are considered in which the moving body is resisted, and this resistance is considered in conjunction with gravitation or centripetal force. Among others, this problem now presents itself for solution: Given the direction, the law of centripetal force, and the law of resistance, to construct the path of the projectile. In particular, if the law of centripetal force is posited as reciprocally duplicate to the distances and the resistance is in the duplicate ratio of the speed, then indeed the problem of Galileo will be solved, as is fitting."

"[I]f we look back to the first Rise of Astronomy... we shall find nothing better approv'd of, nothing more universally entertained among the several Sects of Philosophers, than this notion of the Gravity of the Celestial Bodies."

"After Kepler’s bold and fruitful efforts to advance natural philosophy by the help of geometry, there should have appeared any philosopher and particularly a geometer, namely Descartes, who should leave this one narrow path and try to investigate the causes of things logically, or rather, sophistically. What is to be said of him who while certainly learned in geometry would build his cosmic system (which he valued so highly and of which he boasted so grandiloquently) from vortices, without previously examining whether bodies carried around by a vortex at different distances from the centre would have periodic times whose squares were as the cubes of the distances from the centre? But he was intoxicated by easier and less composite laws, and, not applying his geometric ability in the slightest, fell into errors from which we were at length liberated by the aid of geometers."

"Since two or more mutually gravitating bodies describe orbits around a common immobile centre of gravity, and since by common consent there is an immense difference between the quantity of matter in the sun and that in the Earth, it is clear that neither the sun nor, much less, the sun in the company of five planets can revolve around an immobile Earth. Thus is shown not only the falsity but the impossibility of the ."

"Descartes's cosmic system, which he jokingly called his fable of the world, is shown to be a fable indeed."

"[A]s we are told by Democritus these notions about the Sun and Moon are not to be ascrib'd to Anaxagoras as their original... He had them from his Master Anaximenes whose Opinion... was, that the Stars were of a fiery nature and substance, that there were also mingled with them certain Earthly Bodies... [H]e plainly means, Planets of a terrestrial nature, performing their revolutions in the System of every Fix'd Star."

"Upon this account it is, that every Problem in the Terrestrial Physics is very operose and perplex'd, on the contrary, in the Celestial Physics, much more easy and simple; tho' even the latter has its difficulties, arising from the different distances and magnitudes of the Celestial Bodies, For the Fix'd Stars are so vastly distant asunder, that they have no mutual action upon each other, observable by us..."

"That saying is well known, so often used by Anaxagoras, and his Scholars, Achelaus and Euripides, Namely, "That the Sun and Stars were fiery or red-hot Stones and Golden Clods." Of the same mind also were Democritus, Metrodorus, and Diogenes..."

"[T]hose persons seem to apply their thoughts but to a very indifferent purpose in the study of Nature, that overlook this part of Astronomy, from whence the principal and most simple Laws of Nature are to be learn'd."

"From some things mention'd by Diogenes Laertius concerning Plato, which also are obscurely hinted at in his Timæus I am apt to believe with Galileo that the divine Philosopher suppos'd the Mundane Bodies, when they were first formed, were moved with a Rectilinear motion (by the means of Gravity,) but after that they had arrived to some determined places, they began to revolve by degrees in a Curve, the Rectilinear Motion being chang'd into a Curvilinear one."

"[T]hose who are less vers'd in the more abstruse parts of Geometry, or less concerned about the Physical parts, may pass over, and only read the Astronomy separately and distinct..."

"The Celestial Physics, or Physical Astronomy, is not only the first in dignity of all inquiries into Nature... but the first in order, because it is the easiest."

"[T]he Physics delivered in the following Work... was both known and diligently cultivated by the most ancient Philosophers. ...[T]he true System of the World, approv'd of Pythagoras, and others among the Ancients..."

"[T]he motion of comets is found to be not at all dissimilar to the motion of the planets, depending on the same principles and undergoing continual revolutions. But, since these planets move in ellipses in which the distance of the foci has a great ratio to the transverse axis, and that major axis is immense, their periodic times greatly exceed the periodic times of the common planets, for they are in the sesquialteral ratio [3:2] of the transverse axes [their squares are as the cubes of the axes]. Thus Descartes’s rectilinear cometary trajectory, which he filched from Kepler, collapses, and many things about comets in his fable of the world may be added, which almost two thousand years ago had been shown to be impossible by Lucretius. Such is the free motion in full spaces, to say nothing of the fact that in his system the motion is from time to time against the motion of the vortex. But, in place of so eccentric ellipses whose more remote parts cannot be observed because the comet is not visible there, parabolae may be assumed in calculation, and many things useful for improving astronomy and physics and advancing them further may thus be deduced with the help of the more intricate geometry."

"For the Sun and Planets are separated from one another by so immense a distance, as renders them incapable of exerting most of those forces whereby all Bodies act upon one another; so that they have no other force left them whereby they can affect one another, but the single force of universal Gravity: Whereas in the production of several Phænomena, that are observ'd upon our Earth, innumerable other forces are exerted, such as are very hard to be distinguish'd from one another; which notwithstanding, if not accurately done, in vain do we attempt Nature, and make any inquiry into it."

"[T]he Physics, it is all taken out of the above mention'd Authors; but is here intermix'd with Astronomy, in such places as seem'd proper and convenient; the Geometry to be met with in it, I have either borrowed elsewhere, and quoted... or delivered it Lemmatrically."

"I have just heard your friend Croker, and you could not wish him or any favourite of yours to have made a stronger or more favourable impression upon the House. His speech was one which was calculated to conciliate at this side of the Channel and to gratify at the other. It was replete with ingenuity and yet free from fanciful refinement. It was characterised by an acuteness of legal deduction, and yet exempt from sophistry or the pedantry of profession. It treated a worn-out subject so as to make it appear a new one. But its principal merit in my eyes lay in its frankness, warmth, and sincerity. It redeemed the pledge and fulfilled the promise of his ‘Historical Sketch.’ It showed him to be an honest Irishman no less than an able statesman. It showed him at this moment to be disinterested, and ready to quit the road of fortune under the auspices of his personal friend Peel, if the latter was only to be conciliated by what Oxonians term orthodoxy, and we Cantabs consider as intolerance."

"I am much obliged to you for...your poem, which I have read with great satisfaction. I did not think a battle could be turned into anything so entertaining."

"Impressed as we are with a deep sentiment of the consistency and strength which the revolutionary party have obtained, and are hourly increasing throughout Europe, we shall not fail to recur to the subject whenever we see the press of this country called in aid of the schemes of Buonaparte, or of Buonaparte's auxiliaries, and we shall contribute our mite to the resolution of that famous problem, whether, in a free press, the force of reason and truth, and the principles of order, good morals and true religion, are a match for the adroitness and the audacity of the philosophers of the Revolution and their disciples—the loose in morals, the factious in politics—the preachers of liberty, the practisers of despotism."

"We despise and abominate the details of partizan warfare, but we now are, as we always have been, decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative, party; a party which we believe to compose by far the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent and respectable portion of the population of this country, and without whose support any administration that can be formed will be found deficient both in character and stability."

"Croker is the calumniator general of the human race."

"He was manifestly a man of strict honour, of high principle, of upright life, of great courage, of untiring industry, devoted with singleness of heart to the interests of his country, a loyal friend, and in his domestic relations unexceptionable. Living in the days when party rancour raged, prominent as a speaker in parliament, and wielding a trenchant and too often personally aggressive pen in the leading organ of the tory party, he came in for a very large share of the misrepresentation which always pursues political partisans. His literary tastes were far from catholic in their range, and he made himself obnoxious to the newer school by the dogmatic and narrow spirit and the sarcastic bitterness which are apt to be the sins that more easily beset the self-constituted and anonymous critics of a leading review. Thus to political adversaries he added many an enemy in the field of literature."

"To the British Museum. I looked over the Travels of the Duke of Tuscany, and found the passage the existence of which Croker denies. His blunders are really incredible. The article has been received with general contempt. Really Croker has done me a great service. I apprehended a strong reaction, the natural effect of such a success; and, if hatred had left him free to use his very slender faculties to the best advantage, he might have injured me much. He should have been large in acknowledgment; should have taken a mild and expostulatory tone; and should have looked out for real blemishes, which, as I too well know, he might easily have found. Instead of that, he has written with such rancour as to make everybody sick. I could almost pity him. But he is a bad, a very bad, man: a scandal to politics and to letters."

"My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event [the French Revolution]. I was in my ninth year when the Bastille was taken; it naturally made a great impression on me, and the bloody scenes that so rapidly followed rendered that impression unfavourable. Such also was the feeling of my wise and excellent parents, and an alliance between our family and that of Mr. Burke helped to confirm us in that great man's prophetic opinions, which every event from that day to this appears to me to have wonderfully illustrated and fulfilled."

"There is nothing for which one—at least I—should so much envy as Sir W. Scott as the bold facility with which he seized a subject and by the first glance determined all its properties. He was perpetually wrong in his details, but always right, luminous, and I had almost said exact, in his general view—but I am not of that power. I do nothing at all approaching to well but what I understand in its details. Would I could."

"I prefer an ounce of fact to a ton of imagination."

"The public mind of France had become so excited and perverted by a variety of causes great and small, and of grievances real and imaginary, that at the proclamation for assembling the States-General the whole nation went mad, and to this hour has never recovered from its insanity."

"The fatal consequences are that Peel, by betraying the precise and specific principle upon which he was brought into office, has ruined the character of public men, and dissolved, by dividing, the great landed interest—the only solid foundation on which any Government can be formed in this country. I care comparatively little about his actual corn law experiment; it will fail, and England will right herself from this fraudulent humbug; but while that process is going on, we shall be running all the risks, if not suffering the actual infliction, of a revolution. On the principle on which we have truckled to the League, how are we to resist the attack on the Irish Church—the Irish Union—both much worse cases (in that view) than the Corn Laws. How to maintain primogeniture, the Bishops, the House of Lords, the Crown? Sir Robert Peel has put these into more peril than Cobbett, or Cobden, or O'Connell, or they altogether could have done, and his personal influence has carried away individuals; he has broken up the old interests, divided the great families, and commenced just such a revolution as the Noailles and Montmorencies did in 1789. Look at father and son, and brother and brother, and uncle and nephew—thrown into personal hostility in half the counties of England, and all for what?—to propitiate Richard Cobden."

"Croker, it is true, was always going to write a general history of the Revolution... Croker spent a life-time accumulating material for that purpose. But he never produced the finished article, he was more a seeker after curia, a collector of autographs, than a historian. At least he went to France to get the stuff, bequeathing to the British Museum the finest collection of printed material in existence. He was even aware of the Sections, the sans-culottes. And he did much more for the future of revolutionary studies than any of the others."

"Even though the East Retford case had never happened, or even though it had been decided in a different way, there occurred subsequently other events, as we shall by and by show, which would inevitably have brought us to the present crisis; which, we repeat, has been produced by the state of parties, and not by any general desire for Reform in the public mind. It was the state of parties which waked the spirit of Reform, and not Reform which created the state of parties; and it was only as the Retford question happened to operate on the state of parties, that it had any immediate effect on the question of Reform."

"At a distance of forty years, [it was] the most brilliant scene in the House of Commons during the twenty-three years he was member of it."

"The ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert was none other than the Sutlej, and that it was “lost” when the river turned westwards to join the Bias [Beas]’... ‘It may have been . . . that the Jumna [Yamunā], after leaving the hills, divided its waters . . . and that the portion which flowed to the Punjab was known as the Saraswati while that which joined the Ganges was called the Yamuna.’... (that double desertion of the Sarasvatī, by the Sutlej and the Yamunā, which brought about) ‘a considerable change in the hydrography of the region’... ‘a tradition prevalent, on the borders of Bikaner, to the effect that the waters of the Hakra spread out in a great lake at a place called Kak, south of the Mer country’."

"The government of Athens, after the abolition of Monarchy, was truly democratic and, so much convulsed by those civil dissensions which are the inevitable consequences of that kind of government, that of all the Grecian states the Athenian may be the most strictly termed the seat of faction."

"The study of Cook is the illumination of all discovery."

"For the aborigins of Australia, and to a lesser extent for the Maori of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never fully recovered."

"I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go ..."

"If I have failed in discovering a Continent it is because it does not exist."

"From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb'd by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &c., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air. ... In short they seem'd to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities."

"It is not many years since the production of such a pillar would have been impossibility in the largest foundries of the world, and even now there are comparatively few where a similar mass of metal could be turned out."

"Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a sacred book."

"Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus."

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, Throughout the sensual world proclaim, One crouded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name."