Of the rooms occupied by Newton during his early residence at
Cambridge, it is now difficult to settle the locality. The chamber
allotted to him as Fellow, in 1667, was “the Spiritual Chamber,”
conjectured to have been the ground-room, next the chapel, but it is
not certain that he resided there. The rooms in which he lived from
1682 till he left Cambridge, are in the north-east corner of the great
court, on the first floor, on the right or north of the gateway or
principal entrance to the college. His laboratory, as Dr. Humphrey
Newton tell us, was “on the left end of the garden, near the east end
of the chapel; and his telescope (refracting) was five feet long, and
placed at the head of the stairs, going down into the garden.”[4] The
east side of Newton’s rooms has been altered within the last fifty
years: Professor Sedgwick, who came up to college in 1804, recollects a
wooden room, supported on an arcade, shown in Loggan’s view, in place
of which arcade is now a wooden wall and brick chimney.
Dr. Humphrey Newton relates that in college Sir Isaac very rarely
went to bed till two or three o’clock in the morning, sometimes
not till five or six, especially at spring and fall of the leaf,
when he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the
fire scarcely going out either night or day; he sitting up one
night, and Humphrey another, till he had finished his chemical
experiments. Dr. Newton describes the laboratory as “well furnished
with chymical materials, as bodyes, receivers, heads, crucibles,
&c., which was made very little use of, ye crucibles excepted,
in which he fused his metals: he would sometimes, though very
seldom, look into an old mouldy book, which lay in his laboratory;
I think it was titled _Agricola de Metallis_, the transmuting of
metals being his chief design, for which purpose antimony was a
great ingredient.” “His brick furnaces, _pro re nata_, he made and
altered himself without troubling a bricklayer.” “What observations
he might make with his telescope, I know not, but several of his
observations about comets and the planets may be found scattered
here and there in a book intitled _The Elements of Astronomy_, by
Dr. David Gregory.”[5]