Last week (recall) I returned a stolen Maupertuis to The Institution of Civil Engineers (hereafter: ICE) Library in London. During my visit, while I was admiring a beautiful copy of the third Edition of Newton's Principia, the librarian, Debra Francis, called my attention to a four page manuscript wedged in the first few pages of this Principia. I very quickly decided that it was probably an eighteenth century manuscript because of the paper, ink, and notation/diagrams which looked familiar. (It's immediately made clear we're dealing with falling bodies.) So, while still in the library I sent pictures of it to Niccolo Guicciardini and then to Scott Mandelbrote, George Smith, and Chris Smeenk. Debra and I spent a few minutes on the manuscript which is in English. But most of our attention was devoted to figuring out the provenance of Principia at ICE. As we now know (recall yesterday's post) the ms was found in the Thomas Young's copy of the Principia.
At this point it would be useful to say why I jumped to the conclusion it was an eighteenth century manuscript and perhaps not insignificant, and why I sent the manuscript to these four scholars. [If you are impatient to find out the big reveal, jump to the paragraph below that starts with: "it turns out"....] For, while I have published quite a bit on Newton, I don't usually spend my time looking at manuscripts and thanks to the internet I barely spend any time in special collections anymore. However, between 1993 and 1996 or so my earliest academic experience involved spending multiple Summers in the Huygens archives in Leiden while George Smith and I were working on our project reconstructing Huygens' empirical argument against universal gravity. At the time I was lucky that Joella Yoder (the world's leading Huygens scholar) often overlapped with me in Leiden, while she was cataloging the Huygens' papers at the Leiden University library. She basically gave me on the job training in archival research. Along the way, and with help of many kind archivists and librarians, I was exceedingly lucky in discovering previously unknown material and rediscovering maps (see here, pp. 93-97 & here, pp. 51-55) important to our argument (the forthcoming paper is archived here).* But while this is rich experience, I wouldn't trust myself to know the difference between, say, a forgery or a real Huygens ms. However, I do know by acquaintance what paper and ink of the era looks like.
Second, I have read the Principia three times. Once as an undergrad in the second semester of George Smith's famous Newton course at Tufts University. Once, but in much less detail, with Howard Stein in graduate school in his course on the history of space-time theories. And then again in great detail with Chris Smeenk when we wrote a Handbook article on Newton's Principia. There are a whole range of diagrams and formulations that are distinctive to the Principia because while Newton was building on the work of others, he was also innovating mathematically in it (or drawing on then still secret innovations). But to simplify greatly, while Newton's methods, results, and theories shaped subsequent research, Newton's notations and his presentation of the material are rather distinctive (and were displaced within a century); it has its own vernacular. To give a very low-level example: in Newton the second law is a proportionality (and not an equality such as F=ma). And again, because I rarely work with the Principia (and, as historians of physics go, a below average mathematician), I wouldn't trust myself to identify a passage with any particular proposition of the Principia without double checking a few times.
Now, Niccolo Guicciardini (Milan) is a historian and philosopher and a specialist on Newton's mathematics (and physics!) and who also has deep knowledge of Newton's manuscripts. He is also very generous with his time, and he does not make one feel silly if one reveals one's ignorance. (He was an important interlocuter to me when I developed my interpretation of Newton's philosophy of time and then again, when I responded to Katherine Brading's excellent criticism [see also here] of it.)+ So, he was the first person I thought of. But, as I reflected on what I had seen, I figured it might be useful for somebody to be able to visit the ICE library to inspect the manuscript in person in London. So, that's why I thought of Scott Mandelbrote in Cambridge, who among his many other intellectual virtues, is one of the leading scholars of Newton's manuscripts, including the paper, watermarks, (etc.). And I sent it to Smith and Smeenk because I hoped they would get a kick out of it, and I figured they might recognize the material that's being discussed in the manuscript much more quickly than I would.
Much to my joy Niccolo almost immediately responded to my email. And rather than pointing out my obvious mistake -- 'why bother me with this juvenilia; clearly a school boy exercise; didn't you notice the 19th century notation?' -- he wrote me back to congratulate me on the manuscript which was previously unknown to him. He then went on to say, "I might have seen the hand before … intriguing indeed." And at that moment I knew the story of 'my' stolen Maupertuis would have an interesting afterlife. In a subsequent email he warned me that was not sure about identity of the author and also that it may take a while before he would get back to me due to a family holiday. Okay, so much for set up.
It turns out that Guicciardini and Mandelbrote almost immediately set to work to identify the author, and they are so confident of the author's identity that Niccolo has informed the ICE library of it on March 1. <Drumroll, please.> They think the hand is Henry Pemberton’s--the editor of the third edition! Now, there are not many known manuscripts by Pemberton. But, as I learned from Niccolo, he has a very distinctive way of writing "this." You can see this on p 2 of the manuscript that I have reprinted below and compare it to a letter by Pemberton to Newton (9 February 1725; Cambridge UL, MS Add. 3986.7, fol 1r-1v) that Niccolo shared with Debra Francis and myself.
So, let's connect some dots. The manuscript is in the hand of Henry Pemberton (1694 – 1771), who was the editor of the third edition of the Principia--that is the version of the copy that Tomas Young owned and that was donated to ICE library. So, this leaves some open questions:
- How did Thomas Young acquire this copy of the Principia and the Pemberton ms?
A neat, perhaps too neat, hypothesis is that ICE library actually owns Pemberton's own copy of the edition of Principia that he edited. And so that Pemberton himself inserted the manuscript in his copy of the Principia. This would at least explain how the manuscript ended up in the ICE library copy without having to posit a complex further web of linkages. However, we know that mathematical manuscripts circulated through the eighteenth century. (Well I did not know much about that, but Niccolo reminded me.) And it's also possible that the Pemberton manuscript and Thomas Young's copy of the Principia were brought together by Young himself.
2. Did Young ever use the Ice Libary Pemberton ms.?
3. What are the contents of the ICE library Pemberton ms.? About this more soon.
4. And can the contents help explain why Pemberton wrote this ms.? As we shall see, this will lead us to some outstanding historical puzzles and some major intellectual controversies. Stay tuned!
*Pro tip: befriend the retired archivist who happens to be in the library with you.
+Somewhat oddly, the Wikipedia page of Guiccardini does not mention the Sarton Medal he received in Ghent in 2011/12!
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