NEWTON ON COLOUR
NEWTON, Isaac.
Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions, and Colours of Light. Also two treatises of the species and magnitude of curvilinear figures.
London, for Samuel Smith and Benjamin Walford, printers to the Royal Society, 1704.
4to, pp. [iv], 144, ‘211’ [recte 213], [1 (errata)], with 19 folding copper-engraved plates; title printed in red and black; occasional light foxing, last leaf with small marginal loss to lower outer corner, one plate stained at head, else a fine copy; bound in contemporary Cambridge-panelled calf, gilt green morocco lettering-piece to spine, edges speckled red; skilfully recornered and rebacked to style, extremities slightly rubbed; housed in a cloth box with gilt morocco lettering-piece to spine; small ink stamp ‘R.H. Inglis’ to title verso, modern bookplate of Jean Michel Cantacuzène to front pastedown.
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Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions, and Colours of Light. Also two treatises of the species and magnitude of curvilinear figures.
First edition of Newton’s Opticks, ‘which did for light what his Principia had done for gravitation, namely, placed it on a scientific basis’, and ‘expounds Newton’s corpuscular or emission theory of light, and first contains his important optical discoveries in a collected form’ (Babson), also discussing rainbows and Newton’s Rings.
The work is unusual in being issued almost entirely in English rather than Latin, and in contrast with his Principia mathematica reads more as a record of experiments and the conclusions drawn from them. Newton specifies in his Advertisement that ‘I have here Published what I think proper to come abroad, wishing that it may not be Translated into another Language without my Consent’; ‘My design in this book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments’ (p. 1). Newton explains the composition of colours, using prismatic experiments; discusses rainbows and the effect of light upon colour; and also calculates the varying wavelengths of different colours. The work concludes with a set of ‘Queries’, startling speculations on the nature of matter which had a profound influence on eighteenth-century and later thought. The two final mathematical tracts on curvilinear figures in Latin, published here for the first time, expressly assert Newton’s priority over Leibniz in his third major contribution to science, the invention of calculus.
Provenance:
1. Ink stamp of ‘R.H. Inglis’, likely the Conservative politician Sir Robert Harry Inglis (1786–1855), MP for Dundalk, Ripon, and Oxford University.
2. Christie’s, London, 20 November 1992, lot 198, to Jean Michel Cantacuzène.
Babson 132; PMM 172; Wallis 174. For a discussion of the development of Newton’s optical work, see Shapiro, ‘The evolving structure of Newton’s theory of white light and color’, in Isis 71 (1980), pp. 211–35.