Any chance of a transcript of what it says? I'm having trouble reading it.
Certainly.
(Starting from the second line)
"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went
into the garden and drank tea under the shade of
some appletrees; onle he, and my self. Amidst
other discourse, he told me, he was just in the
same situation, as when formerly, the notion of
gravitation came into his mind. Why should that apple
always descend perpendicularly to the
ground, thought he to himself, occasioned by the fall
of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.
Why should it not go sideways, or upwards, but con-
stantly to thte earth's center? Assuredly, the rea-
son is that the earth draws it. There must be a
drawing power in matter. The sum of the draw-
ing power of the matter in the earth must be in
the earth's center, not in any side of the earth.
Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly
or toward the center. If matter thus draws mat-
ter, it must be in proportion of its quantity.
Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well
as the earth draws the apple.
Thus by degrees, he began to apply this
property of gravitation to the motion of the
earth, and of the heavenly bodies: to consider their
distances, their magnitudes. their periodical re-
volutions: to find out that this property, conjointly"
Newton was 83 years old when he had that conversation with Stukeley, and it was published 25 years after Newtons death. One have to wonder why it took half a century before Newton told anyone about the apple.
One may - though memoirs are often written late in life and occasionally published after; the apple
may just be a good example, though apples have been known to fall to the ground.
