Dark Matter

“I seem to recall that he intended it to be a gift for someone. But who I cannot say.”

“Could you perhaps find me another copy of this book, Mister Lowndes?”

“Not for several weeks,” admitted Mister Lowndes. “I had to send off to Germany to obtain the copy that Mister Macey ordered. You might, of course, search around St. Paul’s. The Latin coffee house near there often holds auctions of rare and expensive books such as the one for which you search.”

Newton grunted without much enthusiasm at such a laborious prospect.

“But I believe I know where you might have sight of a copy, at least, for I ordered a copy of this same book once before.”

Mister Lowndes turned back the pages of his ledger until he found what he was looking for.

“Here we are, Doctor. That other customer was Doctor Wallis. I ordered the same book for him.”

“Doctor John Wallis?” repeated Newton. “Do you mean he that is the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University, sir?”

“Aye sir, the very same. I believe I said as much myself to Mister Macey. He seemed most interested by the news.”

“So am I, sir,” admitted Newton. “So am I.”

Early the next morning we took the flying coach to Oxford, which was a most vexatious journey, with much dangerous water on the road because of recent heavy rain, and there was almost some mischance to the coach, but no time lost, so that we arrived at our destination about thirteen hours after leaving London.

Newton had many friends at Oxford. Chief among these was David Gregory, a young Scotsman who held the Savilian Chair of Astronomy and who, at very short notice, dined us very well at Merton, which is a very pretty place, and was my own college, which made me feel mighty peculiar, my being back there.

I believe Gregory must have been about thirty-eight years of age when first I met him. He was a typical Scot, being small and whey-faced, and very fond of his bottle and his pipe, so that his rooms stank of tobacco like the most fumigated London coffee house; indeed his body seemed incapable of supporting life by any other breath than the smoke of some sweet-scented Virginia. It was to Newton’s influence that the younger Gregory owed his current eminence at Oxford. Over dinner they began to talk of Doctor Wallis.

“But you have not met Wallis before?” asked Gregory. “He was at Cambridge, was he not?”

“We have met, yes. More often we have corresponded. He has been most persistent that I should publish something—nay, anything—in his Opera Mathematica. No doubt he is currently reading the letter I wrote to him yesterday, and my arrival here in Oxford, as a sign that I have changed my mind upon the matter.”

“So why do you wish to see him?”

“It is the business of the Mint that brings me to Oxford. I was hoping that Wallis might help me with some enquiries. Yet more I cannot say, for it is a delicate matter and most secret.”

“Of course,” said Gregory, puffing away like a Dutch boatswain. “But I don’t think that Doctor Wallis is any stranger to secrecy himself. I have heard it said that he does confidential work for milord Sunderland. I think it is something to do with the war, although I wonder how an eighty-year-old man can help to defeat the French. Perhaps he sets them calculations and bids to bore them into submission.”

“Is he still so fond of mathematics?” exclaimed Newton.

“Indeed he is, sir. He is a scholar of real worth, for I have seen him extracting square roots without pen or paper, to seven places.”

“I have seen a horse clap its hoof upon the ground seven times,” Newton remarked. “But I do not think it was a mathematician.”

“He is not your peer,” said Gregory. “You have developed mathematics quite astonishingly.”

“For my own part,” answered Newton, “I think I have barely skimmed the surface of the great ocean of knowledge. Marvellous secrets still remain to be uncovered. It is the challenge of our age to demonstrate the frame of the system of the world. And so long as we continue to distinguish between the formal reason of nature and the act of divine will, I do not see why we should not believe that God himself does not directly inform nature so that the world necessarily emanates from it.”

Here Newton did look at me most directly, so that when he spoke again I formed the impression that perhaps Miss Barton had reported our conversation after all.