Newton's marvellous year: 1666 and all that

When in the summer of 1718 Pierre Des Maizeaux, then resident in London, communicated to Newton a first printed version of the preface to his projected Recueil of correspondence which had a few years previously passed between Leibniz, Clarke, Conti and others (including Newton himself) (1), the latter felt compelled to draft a long reply, clarifying his own attitude and emphasizing especially his claim to priority over Leibniz in the invention of the calculus. One passage of this response, usually quoted out of context, has since it was first published in 1888 (2) come to be accepted as a fundamental documentary source for our knowledge of the sequence of Newton’s scientific discoveries in his so-called annus mirabilis of 1666: