olarship, there were ways provided so he could earn money by private
tutoring and giving lectures in the absence of the professors.

He had written his essay on fluxions, described their application to
fluents and tangents, and devised a plan for finding the radius of
curvity in crooked lines. In August of the same year that Newton was
given his degree, the college was dismissed on account of an epidemic,
and Newton went home to Woolsthorpe to kill time. In September, Sixteen
Hundred Sixty-five, he then being twenty-three, while seated in his
mother's garden, Newton saw that storied apple fall. What pulled it
down? Some force tugging at it, surely!

Galileo had experimented with falling bodies, and had proved that the
weight and size of a falling body had nothing to do with its velocity,
save as its size and shape might be affected by the friction of the
atmosphere. The first person to put into print the story of the falling
apple was Voltaire, whose sketch of Newton is a little classic which the
world could ill afford to lose. Adam, William Tell and Isaac Newton each
had his little affair with an apple, but with different results.

The falling apple suggested to Newton that there was some power in the
ground that was constantly pulling things toward the center of the
earth.

This power extended straight down into the earth--he knew it--he had
dropped a stone into a mine, and had also dropped things from steeples.
He dropped apples from kites by an ingenious device of two strings, and
he concluded that an apple taken a hundred miles up in the air would
return to earth.

He then began to speculate as to just what a body would do a thousand or
ten thousand miles from the earth. So high as we could go, or as deep as
we could dig, this drawing power was always present. The Law of
Gravitation!

If a cannon-ball was fired in a straight line at a distant target, the
gunner had to elevate the aim if he would hit the target, for the ball
described a curve and would keep dropping to the earth until it struck
the ground. Something was pulling it down: what was it? The Law of
Gravitation!

The moon was attracted toward us and would surely fall into us, but for
the fact that there were other attractions drawing her toward them. The
movements of the planets were owing to the fact that they were obeying
attractions. They were moving in curves, just like cannon-balls in
motion. They had two movements, also, like the cannon-ball