The Press. — London, England, 1858-09-25 00:00:00

feeling of the English and French forces that the resistance of China was so promptly overcome. The last is a new proof that the Emperor, in spite of the bad feeling towards him which is manifested by certain politicians and journals in England, is still as firmly bent on maintaining the English alliance es ever he was. The amount of indemnity is considered small to the French, and they are excessively annoyed at the idea that England is to receive double. To soothe the ruffled vanity of the lieges on this subject, the Government has instructed its newspaper organs, home and foreign, to declare that one half of the English indemnity is not a war indemnity properly so called, but is destined to recompense English subjects who have had property destroyed at Canton, where no French. m en lost anything ; and it is added that that half will not be enough for the purpose ; so that, in point of fact, "France actually receives more from China than England !" Apropos of China, a most absurd report is current. It is that the Emperor of that flowery land is forth with to be made a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, a Knight of the Bath, and a knight of some Russian order ! Our grandchildren may, perhaps, behold such honours conferred on his successor, just as we have seen the " Paynim Sultan " made a Knight of the Garter and of other European orders ; but assuredly his present Celestial Majesty is not sufficiently within the pale of European courtesies to obtain, nor even to understand, such dignities. At last Marshal I'elissier has published his banns of marriage with Mlle. de la Paniega, and by his so doing, the public has learned that he bears the Christian name of "Amiable," which is of good omen for his bride. As to Marshal Canrobert, to whom gossip also gave a Spanish lady, it appears that it is not in Spain but in France that he has sought a wife, and that the fair one is a wealthy heiress of Champagne, her fortune, however, coming not from vineyards, like most in that province, but from iron-works. For some years past the vintage in France has been very indifferent, but, according to all accounts, that of the present year will be magnificent, both in quality and quantity. The weather is for it every thing that could be desired. The French, however, have of late, especially in towns, got into the habit of drinking large quantities of beer, a liquor which, a quarter of a century back, they scarcely ever touched —so that a good vintage is not of the vast importance it used to be. INAUGURATION OF THE STATUE OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON AT GRANTHAM. THE statue of Sir Isaac Newton was inaugu rated at Grantham on Tuesday. The memorial to the illustrious mathematician and philoso pher, justly described as " the greatest genius of the human race," who was born at the manor house of Woolsthorpe, a hamlet eight miles from Grantham, on Christmas day, 1642, is of bronze, after a design by Mr. Theed, and has cost 1,630/ ,of which 600/. was contributed by the in• habitants of Grantham and the neighbourhood. The likeness of Sir Isaac is copied from a mask of his face taken aftbr death, and from the portrait bust by Roubilliac. It represents him in the costume of the period, and in the gown of a Master of Arts in the act of lecturing. The figure is nearly thirteen feet high, weighing upwards of two tons, and about half the quantity of the material of which it is composed was presented, in the shape of old gun metal, by her Majesty's Government. The statue was cast at the foundry of Messrs. Robinson and Cottam, of Pimlico, and, as a specimen of clean casting, with sharp outline, does them high credit. The figure stands upon a pedestal of Anglesey marble, designed by Mr. Theed, and cut out by Mr. Rogers, of Parkhill. The total height of the pedestal and figure is twenty-seven feet. The interest which such a ceremony would have excited under ordinary circumstances was increased by the announcement that the inaugural address would be delivered by Lord Brougham, whose devotion to philosophical investigations especially qualified him for such an opportunity. The noble and learned lord, who has just completed his eightieth year, and upon whose physical vigour time has made comparatively slight inroads, while his mental energy, as will be evident to those who peruse his address, remains unimpaired, arrived at Grantham early in the morning, and was received at the Grammar-school by the Mayor (Mr. J. L. Ostler), th e R ecor d e r (Mr. W. H. Roberts), the Bishop of Lincoln, Mr. M. Milnes, M.P., Sir J. Tinllope, M.P., Mr. A. Wilson, M.P., the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor Owen, Mr. W. Fairhairn, Dr. Lee, Sir E. Cust, Sir J. Rennie, Sir B. Brodie, Mr. C. Tumor, Colonel Fane, Major Moore, Sir J. Tborold, the members of the Corporation, and other gentlemen. A procession was then formed to St. Peters-hill, the site of the statue. Lord nrougham—fo r w h om a c h a i r , formerly belonging to Sir I. Newton, was placed upon a dais in front of the tune —was greeted with loud and reiterated THE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 25, 1858. applause. At a signal the veil which concealed the statue from public view was withdrawn amid general cheering, and the band played the National Anthem, all the company standing. Lord BROUGHAM then delivered the following address, which was listened to with marked attention, and was frequently applauded : To record the names and preserve the memory of those whose great achievements in science, in arts, or in arms, have conferred benefits and lustre upon our kind, has in all ages been regarded as a duty and felt as a gratification by wise and reflecting men. The desire of inspiring an ambition to emulate such examples generally mingles itself with these sentiments ; but they cease not to ope rate even in the rare instances of transcendent merit, where matchless genius excludes all possibility of imita tion, and nothing remains but wonder in those who con template its triumphs at a distance, that forbids all attempts to approach. We are this day assembled to com memorate him of whom the consent of nations have declared that he is chargeable with nothing like a follower's exaggeration or local partiality, who pronounces the name of Newton as that of the greatest genius ever bestowed by the bounty of Providence for instructing mankind on the frame of the universe, and the laws by which it is governed : Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit, et omnes Restinsit; stellar exortus uti s3therius aol.—(Luc.) Iu genius who surpassed mankind as far As does the midday sun the midnight star.—; Dryden.) But, though scaling these lofty heights be hopeless, yet is there some use and much gratification in contemplating 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 satis fied, 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 circum stances, whether accidental or intrinsic, and to mark in passing the misconceptions raised by individual ignorance or national prejudice, which the historian of science occa sionally 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 groat and many ordinary individuals, pre cociously developed. Among the former, Clairant stands pre-eminent, who at nineteen years of age presented to the Royal Academy a memoir of great originality upon a diffi cult subject in the higher geometry, and at eighteen pub lished his great work on curves of double curvature, com posed during the two preceding years. Pascal, too, at sixteen, 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 pre vented him from entering upon mathematical study before his eighteenth year ; and then a much greater marvel was wrought than even the Clairants and the Pascals displayed. His earliest history is involved in some obscurity, and the most celebrated of men has, in this particular, been com pared 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 eighteen and twenty two, he bad begun to study mathematic science, and had taken his place among its greatest masters; learnt for the first time the elements of geometry and analysis, and disco vered a calculus which entirely changed the face of the science, effecting a complete revolution in that and in every branch of philosophy connected with it. Before 1661 he had not read Euclid ; in 1665 he had committed to writing the method of fluzions. At twenty-five years of age he had discovered the law of gravitation, and laid the foundation of celestial dynamics, the science created by him. Before ten years had elapsed he added to his discoveries that of the fundamental properties of light. So brilliant a course of discovery in so short a time, changing and reconstructing analytical, astronomical, and optical science, almost defies belief. The statement could only be deemed possible by any appeal to the incontestable evidence that proves it strictly true. By a rare felicity these doctrines gained the universal assent of mankind as soon as they were clearly understood ; and their originality has never been seriously called in question. Some doubts having been raised re specting his inventing the calculus—doubts raised in con sequence of his so long withholding the publication of his method—no sooner was the inquiry instituted than the evidence produced proved so decisive that all men in all countries acknowledged him to have been by several years the earliest inventor, and Leibnitz, at the utmost, the first publisher, the only questions raised being, first, whether or not he had borrowed from Newton; and next, whether, as second inventor, he could have any merit at all—both which questions have long since been decided in favour of Leibnitz. But undeniable though it be that Newton made the great steps of Ibis progress, and made them without any anticipation or participation by others, it is equally certain that there had been approaches iu former times by preceding philosophers to the same discoveries. Cavalleri, by his Geometry of indivisibles ( 1835 ), Roberval, by his Method of Tangents (1387), had both given solutions 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 fluzions ; and Fermat, in the interval between them, comes still nearer the great discovery by his de termination of maxima and minima, and his drawing of tangents. More recently Hudden had made public similar methods invented by Schoetin ; and whit is mii• terial, treating the subject algebraically, while thoile just now mentioned had rather dealt with it geometrically. It is thus easy to perceive how near an approach had 927 been made to the law of gravitation, and the dynamical system of the universe. Gehleo's important propositions on motion, especially on curvilinear motion, anti 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 flying off by the centrifugal force. Even the com position of white light, and the different action of bodies upon its component parts, had been vaguely conjectured by Ant. tle Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro, at the be ginning, and more precisely in the middle of the seven teenth century by Marcus ( Kronland, of Prague), un known 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 than Marcus's experiment. But all this only shows that the diTcoveries of Newton, great and rapid as were the steps by which they advanced our knowledge, yet obeyed the law of continuity, or rather of gradual progress, which governs all human approaches towards perfection. The limited nature of man's faculties precludes the possibility of his ever reaching at once the utmost excellence of which they are capable. Survey the whole elide of the sciences, and trace the history of progress in each, you find this to be the universal rule. The grand difference, then, between one discovery or invention and another is in degree rather than in kind; the degree in which a person, while he out strips those whom he comes after, also lives, as it were, before his age. Nor can any doubt exist that, in this respect, Newton stands at the head of all who have ex tended the bounds of knowledge. The sciences of dyna mics and of optics are especially to be regarded in this point of view; hut the former in particular; and the completeness of the system which he unfolded, its having been at the first elaborated and given in perfection, its having, however new, stood the test of time, and survived, nay gained by, the most rigorous scrutiny, can be predi cated of this system alone, at least in the same degree. That the calculus, and those parts of dynamics which are purely mathematical, should thus endure for ever is a matter of course. But his system of the universe rests partly upon contingent truths, and might have yielded to new experiments and more extended observation. Nay, at times it has been thought to fail, and further investi gation was deemed requisite to ascertain if any error had been introduced—if any circumstance had escaped the notice of the great founder. The most memo rable instance of this kind is the discrepancy supposed to have been found between the theory and the fact in the motion of the lunar apsides, which about the middle of the last century occupied the three first analyst of the age. The error was discovered by themselves to have been their own iii the process of their investiga tion ; and this, like all the other doubts that were ever momentarily entertained, only led in each instance to new and more brilliant triumphs of the system. The prodigious superiority in this cardinal point of the Newtonian to other discoveries appears manifest upon examining almost any of the chapters in the history of science. But the most marvellous attribute of Newton's discoveries is that in which they stand out prominent among all the other feats of scientific research, stamped with the peculiarity of his intellectual character ; they were, their great author lived before his age, antici pating in part what was long after wholly accomplished, and thus unfolding some things which at the time could be put imperfectly, others not at all comprehended, and not rarely pointing out the path and affording the means of treading it, to the ascertainment of truths then veiled in darkness. He not only enlarged the actual dominion of knowledge, penetrating to regions never before ex plored, and taking with a firm hand undisputed posses sion, but he showed how the bounds of the visible horizon might be yet further extended, and enabled his successors to occupy what he could only descry; as the illustrious discoverer of the new world made the inha bitants of the old cast their eyes over lands and seas far distant from those he had traversed—lands and seas of which they could form to themselves no conception, any more than they hail been able to comprehend the course by which he led them on his grand enterprize. In this achievement, and in the qualities which alone made it possible, inexhaustible fertility of resources, patience unsubdued, close meditation that would suffer no distraction, steady determination to pursue paths that seemed all but hopeless, and unflinching courage to declare the truths they led to, how far soever removed from ordinary apprehension—in these characteristics of high and original genius we may be permitted to com pare the career of those great men. lint the contem plation of Newton's discoveries raises other feelings than wonder at his matchless genius. The light with which it shines is not more dazzling than neon!. The diffi culties of his course and his expedients, alike copious and refined for surmounting them, exercise the faculties of the wise while commanding their admiration. But the results of his investigations, often abstruse, are truths so grand and comprehensive, yet so plain, that they both captivate and instruct the simple. The grati tude, too, which they inspire, and the veneration with which they encircle his name, far from tending to obstruct future improvement, only proclaim his disciples the zealous because rational followers of one whose example both encouraged and enabled his successors to make fur ther progress. How unlike the blind devotion to a master which for so many ages of the modern world paralyzed the energies of the human mind : Had ws still paid that homage to a name Which only God and Nature justly claim,