A treatise of the system of the world. By Sir Isaac Newton. Translated
into English. London, 1728, 8vo.
I think I have a right to one little paradox of my own: I greatly doubt
that Newton wrote this book. Castiglione,[290] in his _Newtoni
Opuscula_,[291] gives it in the Latin which appeared in 1731,[292] not for
the first time; he says _Angli omnes Newtono tribuunt_.[293] It appeared
just after Newton's death, without the name of any editor, or any allusion
to Newton's {140} recent departure, purporting to be that popular treatise
which Newton, at the beginning of the third book of the _Principia_, says
he wrote, intending it to be the third book. It is very possible that some
observant turnpenny might construct such a treatise as this from the third
book, that it might be ready for publication the moment Newton could not
disown it. It has been treated with singular silence: the name of the
editor has never been given. Rigaud[294] mentions it without a word: I
cannot find it in Brewster's _Newton_, nor in the _Biographia Britannica_.
There is no copy in the Catalogue of the Royal Society's Library, either in
English or Latin, except in Castiglione. I am open to correction; but I
think nothing from Newton's acknowledged works will prove--as laid down in
the suspected work--that he took Numa's temple of Vesta, with a central
fire, to be intended to symbolize the sun as the center of our system, in
the Copernican sense.[295]
Mr. Edleston[296] gives an account of the _lectures_ "de motu corporum,"
and gives the corresponding pages of the _Latin_ "De Systemate Mundi" of
1731. But no one mentions the _English_ of 1728. This English seems to
agree with the Latin; but there is a mystery about it. The preface says,
"That this work as here published is genuine will so clearly appear by the
intrinsic marks it bears, that it will be but losing words and the reader's
time to take pains in giving him any other satisfaction." Surely fewer
words would have been lost if the prefator had said at once that the work
was from the manuscript preserved at Cambridge. Perhaps it was a mangled
copy clandestinely taken and interpreted. {141}