Page:A History of Mathematics (1893).djvu/251

 before, and appealed for justice to the Royal Society and to Newton himself. The Royal Society, thus appealed to as a judge, appointed a committee which collected and reported upon a large mass of documents—mostly letters from and to Newton, Leibniz, Wallis, Collins, etc. This report, called the Commercium Epistolicum, appeared in the year 1712 and again in 1725, with a Recensio prefixed, and additional notes by Keill. The final conclusion in the Commercium Epistolicum was that Newton was the first inventor. But this was not to the point. The question was not whether Newton was the first inventor, but whether Leibniz had stolen the method. The committee had not formally ventured to assert their belief that Leibniz was a plagiarist. Yet there runs throughout the document a desire of proving Leibniz guilty of more than they meant positively to affirm. Leibniz protested only in private letters against the proceeding of the Royal Society, declaring that he would not answer an argument so weak. John Bernoulli, in a letter to Leibniz, which was published later in an anonymous tract, is as decidedly unfair towards Newton as the friends of the latter had been towards Leibniz. Keill replied, and then Newton and Leibniz appear as mutual accusers in several letters addressed to third parties. In a letter to Conti, April 9, 1716, Leibniz again reminded Newton of the admission he had made in the scholium, which he was now desirous of disavowing; Leibniz also states that he always believed Newton, but that, seeing him connive at accusations which he must have known to be false, it was natural that he (Leibniz) should begin to doubt. Newton did not reply to this letter, but circulated some remarks among his friends which he published immediately after hearing of the death of Leibniz, November 14, 1716. This paper of Newton gives the following explanation pertaining to the scholium in question: "He [Leibniz] pretends that in my