Note 6 — Chapter I

“One of his uncles,” says M. Biot, “having one day found him under a hedge with a book in his hand and entirely absorbed in meditation, took it from him, and found that he was occupied in the solution of a mathematical problem. Struck with finding so serious and so active a disposition at so early an age, he urged his mother no longer to thwart him, and to send him back to Grantham to continue his studies.” I have omitted this anecdote in the text, as I cannot find it in Turner’s Collections, from which M. Biot derived his details of Newton’s infancy, nor in any other work.