Editing Isaac Newton (section)

== Alchemy ==
{{Quote box
 | quote  = Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
 | source = –[[John Maynard Keynes]], "Newton, the Man"<ref>{{Cite web |title=John Maynard Keynes: Newton, the Man |url=https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton/ |access-date=6 May 2023 |website=Maths History |archive-date=17 June 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190617095839/http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html |url-status=live }}</ref>
 | width  = 30%
 | align  = right
}}

Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with [[alchemy]]. Many of Newton's writings on alchemy are copies of other manuscripts, with his own annotations.<ref name="Mann" /> Alchemical texts mix artisanal knowledge with philosophical speculation, often hidden behind layers of wordplay, allegory, and imagery to protect craft secrets.<ref name="Meyer">{{Cite journal |last=Meyer |first=Michal |year=2014 |title=Gold, secrecy and prestige |url=https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/gold-secrecy-and-prestige |url-status=live |journal=Chemical Heritage Magazine |volume=32 |issue=1 |pages=42–43 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180320230826/https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/gold-secrecy-and-prestige |archive-date=20 March 2018 |access-date=20 March 2018}}</ref> Some of the content contained in Newton's papers could have been considered heretical by the church.<ref name="Mann" />

In 1888, after spending sixteen years cataloguing Newton's papers, Cambridge University kept a small number and returned the rest to the Earl of Portsmouth. In 1936, a descendant offered the papers for sale at Sotheby's.<ref name="Kean" /> The collection was broken up and sold for a total of about £9,000.<ref name="Greshko">{{Cite journal |last=Greshko |first=Michael |date=4 April 2016 |title=Isaac Newton's Lost Alchemy Recipe Rediscovered |url=http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160404-isaac-newton-alchemy-mercury-recipe-chemistry-science/ |url-status=dead |journal=National Geographic |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160426031049/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160404-isaac-newton-alchemy-mercury-recipe-chemistry-science/ |archive-date=26 April 2016 |access-date=25 April 2016}}</ref> [[John Maynard Keynes]] was one of about three dozen bidders who obtained part of the collection at auction. Keynes went on to reassemble an estimated half of Newton's collection of papers on alchemy before donating his collection to Cambridge University in 1946.<ref name="Kean">{{Cite journal |last=Kean |first=Sam |year=2011 |title=Newton, The Last Magician |url=http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/newton-the-last-magician |url-status=live |journal=Humanities |volume=32 |issue=1 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160413235352/http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/newton-the-last-magician |archive-date=13 April 2016 |access-date=25 April 2016}}</ref>

All of Newton's known writings on alchemy are currently being put online in a project undertaken by [[Indiana University]]: "The Chymistry of Isaac Newton"<ref name="Indiana">{{Cite web |title=The Chymistry of Isaac Newton |url=https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160426013127/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/ |archive-date=26 April 2016 |access-date=25 April 2016 |website=Indiana University, Bloomington}}</ref> and has been summarised in a book.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Newman |first=William&nbsp;R. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NT9hDwAAQBAJ |title=Newton the Alchemist Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature's "Secret Fire" |date=2018 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0-691-17487-7}}</ref>

{{blockquote|Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some thirty years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues. We refer to Newton's involvement in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, "chymistry."<ref name="Indiana" />}}

In June 2020, two unpublished pages of Newton's notes on [[Jan Baptist van Helmont]]'s book on plague, ''De Peste'',<ref>Van Helmont, Iohannis Baptistae, ''Opuscula Medica Inaudita: IV. De Peste'', Editor Hieronymo Christian Paullo (Frankfurt am Main) Publisher Sumptibus Hieronimi Christiani Pauli, typis Matthiæ Andreæ, 1707.</ref> were being auctioned online by [[Bonhams]]. Newton's analysis of this book, which he made in Cambridge while protecting himself from London's 1665–1666 [[Great Plague of London|infection]], is the most substantial written statement he is known to have made about the plague, according to Bonhams. As far as the therapy is concerned, Newton writes that "the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison".<ref>{{Cite news |last=Flood |first=Alison |date=2 June 2020 |title=Isaac Newton proposed curing plague with toad vomit, unseen papers show |work=The Guardian |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-plague-cure-toad-vomit |url-status=live |access-date=6 June 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200606192933/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-plague-cure-toad-vomit |archive-date=6 June 2020}}</ref>