18th century science manuscript.

Citing newton, harvey, & pascal. An unusual late 18th century manuscript on classical physics that cites Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, William Harvey, Henry Power, and others.

The text, approximately 200 pages, presents an ordered and detailed account of a number of related topics: optics; hydrostatics and pneumatics; mechanics including simple machines such as the lever and screw, the behaviour of descending bodies, and pendulums; phosphorus and its chemical transformations; and fortifications and architecture. The notes are dense but generally neat and legible with carefully prepared diagrams, so this seems to be a fair copy rather than a working notebook.

Newton is cited in the section on light and colour: 'What Sir I.N. has said by way of [?] in the last edit of his Opticks will appear to be an established truth from most if not all the following examples, some of which he mentions himself". And Harvey in a short section on chemical transformations: "Harvey had (says he) the opportunity as well as the curiosity upon several occasions to examine the weight of [?] when some of them taken up in places very distant from one another...'.

The origin of much of the material is unclear, though the long section on hydrostaticks was taken from Hydrostatical and Pneumatical Lectures by Roger Cotes (1682-1716), originally published privately in 1738 and with a second edition at Cambridge in 1747.

Cotes was 'probably the most talented British mathematician of the generation after Newton'. He was nominated as the first Plumian professor of astronomy at Cambridge in 1706 and 'his appointment was favoured by his influential mentor Richard Bentley, master of Trinity; by Newton's successor as Lucasian professor, William Whiston, who claimed to be in mathematics "a child to Mr Cotes" (Whiston, 133); and by Newton himself... In 1709 Cotes became heavily involved in the work for which he is best remembered, namely the revisions for the second edition of Newton's Philosophia naturalis principia mathematica, the first being out of print' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Cotes died young, and Newton was reported to have said that, 'if he had lived we might have known something'. A number of Cotes's lectures and mathematical analyses were published posthumously by his executor Robert Smith, the Hydrostatical and Pneumatical Lectures being one of them. It is tempting to question whether other portions of the present manuscript are also based on Cotes's work, and further academic scrutiny might be fruitful.

100-leaf manuscript, rectos and most versos filled, wax seal remnants to front pastedown, leaves wavy at the edges, some spotting and marks to contents; contemporary calf-backed blue paper boards, gilt floral tools to spine compartments, binding marked and worn with spine cords partially exposed and loss of the blue paper, morocco label lacking, naphthalene smell, good condition, housed in a black cloth folding case.