David Gregory’s inaugural lecture at Oxford

Abstract

It was not long before I, with immense Pains, but no Assistance, set myself with the utmost Zeal to the Study of Sir Isaac Newtons wonderful Discoveries in his Philosophiae NaturalisPrincipia Mathematica, one or two of which Lectures I had heard him read in the publick Schools, though I understood them not at all at that Time. Being indeed greatly excited thereto by a Paper of Dr. s when he was Professor in Scotland; wherein he had given the most prodigious Commendations to that Work, as not only right in all Things, but in a manner the Effect of a plainly Divine Genius, and had already caused several of his Scholars to keep Acts, as we call them, upon several Branches of the Newtonian Philosophy; while we at Cambridge, poor Wretches, were ignominiously studying the fictitious Hypotheses of the Cartesian, which Sir Isaac Newton had also himself done formerly, as I have heard him say. (William Whiston in 1749 (1).)