the best materials to be used in construction.

Meanwhile the future philosopher was acquiring a taste for reading and
study, delving into old volumes whenever he found an opportunity. These
habits convinced his relatives that it was useless to attempt to make a
farmer of the youth, as had been their intention. He was therefore sent
back to school, and in the summer of 1661 he matriculated at Trinity
College, Cambridge. Even at college Newton seems to have shown no
unusual mental capacity, and in 1664, when examined for a scholarship by
Dr. Barrow, that gentleman is said to have formed a poor opinion of the
applicant. It is said that the knowledge of the estimate placed upon
his abilities by his instructor piqued Newton, and led him to take up
in earnest the mathematical studies in which he afterwards attained such
distinction. The study of Euclid and Descartes's "Geometry" roused in
him a latent interest in mathematics, and from that time forward his
investigations were carried on with enthusiasm. In 1667 he was elected
Fellow of Trinity College, taking the degree of M.A. the following
spring.

It will thus appear that Newton's boyhood and early manhood were passed
during that troublous time in British political annals which saw the
overthrow of Charles I., the autocracy of Cromwell, and the eventual
restoration of the Stuarts. His maturer years witnessed the overthrow of
the last Stuart and the reign of the Dutchman, William of Orange. In his
old age he saw the first of the Hanoverians mount the throne of England.
Within a decade of his death such scientific path-finders as Cavendish,
Black, and Priestley were born--men who lived on to the close of the
eighteenth century. In a full sense, then, the age of Newton bridges
the gap from that early time of scientific awakening under Kepler
and Galileo to the time which we of the twentieth century think of as
essentially modern.

THE COMPOSITION OF WHITE LIGHT

In December, 1672, Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society,
and at this meeting a paper describing his invention of the refracting
telescope was read. A few days later he wrote to the secretary, making
some inquiries as to the weekly meetings of the society, and intimating
that he had an account of an interesting discovery that he wished to lay
before the society. When this communication was made public, it proved
to be an explanation of the discovery of the composition of white light.
We have seen th