Note 202 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

The statements of Huygens and of Isaac Vossius to the effect that Descartes had seen the papers of Snell before publishing his discovery, are unsupported by any direct evidence; at least none of the historians of science, so far as I am aware, have brought forward any. So strong, however, is the disposition of mankind at large to depreciate great men, and so general is the desire to convict them of plagiarism, that this charge, improbable in itself, and only resting on the testimony of two envious rivals, has been not only revived by modern writers, but has been, even in our own time, spoken of as a well-established and notorious fact! The flimsy basis of this accusation is clearly exposed by M. Bordas Demoulin, in his valuable work Le Cartesianisme, Paris, 1843, vol. ii. pp. 9–12; while, on the other side of the question, I refer with regret to Sir D. Brewster on the Progress of Optics, Second Report of British Association, pp. 309, 310; and to Whewell's Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, vol. ii. pp. 379, 502, 503.