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Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2006) 60, 25–34

doi:10.1098/rsnr.2005.0117
Published online 20 January 2006

ISAAC NEWTON’S ALCHEMICAL NOTES IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY

by
JOHN T. YOUNG*

The Newton Project, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine,
Imperial College, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2AZ, UK

A substantial 16-folio alchemical manuscript entirely in the hand of Isaac Newton, thought
lost since 1936, was recently discovered among the Royal Society’s previously uncatalogued
Miscellaneous Manuscripts. This paper is intended to supplement a full online diplomatic
transcription of this important document with a short account of how the manuscript came to
be lost and found again, a summary of its content, evidence about its sources, composition
and dating, and suggestions as to the lines on which subsequent research might proceed. Like
most of Newton’s alchemical writings, the work in question is largely if not wholly
derivative, and it may be a conflation of what was originally conceived as two or more distinct
documents. A few parts of it, however, may contain elements of Newton’s own commentary
and/or records of his own laboratory practice. No definitive conclusions are offered about
such possibilities: the aim is rather to draw attention to the document’s existence and
significance and to encourage further, more detailed research on it.

Keywords: Isaac Newton; alchemy/alchemical/alchemist; history of science;

transmutation; Faber

A LOST MANUSCRIPT FOUND

Isaac Newton has been ‘outed’ many times as an alchemist. As long ago as 1855, his
biographer David Brewster felt reluctantly obliged to disclose that the paragon of rationalist
science had also been ‘the copyist of the most contemptible alchemical poetry’ and had
seriously studied and annotated works that were ‘the obvious product of a fool and a knave’.1
When the bulk of what had been deemed Newton’s non-‘scientific’ papers was auctioned at
Sotheby’s in 1936, the economist J. M. Keynes set about amassing what remains the world’s
largest collection of ‘chymical’ Newtoniana (now held in King’s College, Cambridge).2 In
his posthumously published article ‘Newton, the Man’, Keynes radically challenged the
prevailing ‘rationalist hero’ image of Newton, declaring that he ‘was not the first of the age of
reason. He was the last of the magicians.’3

*j.young@imperial.ac.uk
The electronic supplementary material is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2005.0117 or via
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk.

25 q 2006 The Royal Society

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26 J. T. Young

Since then, no serious student of Newton has been able to overlook his Hermetic side.
F. S. Taylor, B. J. T. Dobbs, Karin Figala, R. S. Westfall and W. R. Newman, among many
others, have made valuable contributions to the understanding of Newton’s alchemy and its
relation to his other studies. Yet comparatively recent popular biographies such as Michael
White’s The last sorcerer and Louis Verlet’s La malle de Newton [Newton’s trunk], and two
still more recent BBC television documentaries, have made much of Newton’s ‘secret life’ as
an alchemist and the shock value of ‘revealing’ it all over again.4
Hence, the discovery among the Royal Society’s previously uncatalogued Miscellaneous
Manuscripts of a substantial 16-folio alchemical manuscript in Newton’s hand was less
revelatory than much of the attendant press coverage implied. The document does not
‘expose’ Newton as an alchemist: anyone with more than a passing interest in the man and his
work was already well aware he was one. This does not, however, diminish the significance of
the discovery or the intrinsic interest of the manuscript in question.
The manuscript—MM/6/5—was spotted by Royal Society archivist Ross MacFarlane,
who found it towards the end of 2004 while sifting through the chaotic profusion of the
Society’s miscellanea, and I was invited to inspect the new find. Because typewritten notes
bound together with the manuscript recorded that it had been acquired from the bookseller
Francis Edwards (although with no mention of a date or price for the acquisition), it was no
great feat of detective work to identify it as Lot 22 from the Sotheby sale, which had been
bought by Edwards on 13 July 1936 for £15.
MacFarlane has subsequently unearthed further evidence of the manuscript’s provenance:
it was bought from Edwards by the Society on 23 March 1939 for £23 8s. MacFarlane gives a
brief and lively account of it in a more general article on new finds among the Miscellaneous
Manuscripts in last autumn’s issue of Notes and Records (still unpublished at the time of
writing).

NOTES TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS OF THE DOCUMENT

A detailed scholarly account of the manuscript lies far beyond the remit of this paper and
would alone furnish the material for a PhD thesis, or at least a substantial component of one.
My aim here is merely to facilitate such an undertaking by providing, online (see electronic
supplementary material), a transcript of the document and suggesting some of the lines such
research might follow. This short paper sets out to raise more questions than it answers.
Like almost all Newton’s alchemical papers, the document is largely if not wholly
derivative. Most of it is explicitly presented as copy extracts from earlier writers or notes on
their work. Often, Newton cites chapter and verse for such references, sometimes specifying
not only the page but even the line number of a given reference. So it is tempting to speculate
that the few passages unfurnished with such source references represent Newton’s own
thoughts or findings—tempting, but rash. Newton’s alchemical manuscripts are almost all
working notes intended solely for his own use: hardly any seem to have been written with an
eye to publication or even informal circulation in manuscript. So he noted references when he
thought he himself might need to be reminded of them: if he was confident he would
remember the provenance of material he was quoting from or paraphrasing, there was simply
no need for him to make a note of it.
A cautionary tale is provided by Betty Dobbs’s assertion, in an important and often
illuminating study of Newton’s alchemy, that a manuscript in Newton’s hand entitled ‘Clavis’
(‘Key’), setting out a detailed account of a transmutational process, must be by Newton
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Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes 27

himself. The plain style, the clarity of exposition, the lack of allegorical obfuscation and the
absence of any source references all pointed, she thought, to Newton’s authorship. However,
William Newman later proved that Newton had in fact copied the text from a manuscript by
George Starkey—a man who, on the basis of his published writings, had generally been
considered one of the most thoroughly and wilfully obscure of all early modern ‘chymists’.5
To produce a full analysis of MM/6/5, one would ideally wish to check every one of the
hundreds of Newton’s often highly specific references against the original publications—and,
where possible, against the individual copies of the publications in question owned by
Newton himself, if he did own them; and in most cases he did. His personal library still
survives substantially intact in Trinity College, Cambridge, and John Harrison’s superb study
The library of Isaac Newton gives full bibliographical details of the volumes held there and of
other works that Newton can be shown to have owned.6 It is important to bear in mind that
many of the works cited in MM/6/5 that are not listed as individual volumes in Harrison’s
bibliography can be found in anthologies owned by Newton that Harrison does list—notably
Lazarus Zetzner’s monumental six-volume compendium Theatrum chemicum7 and Elias
Ashmole’s verse anthology Theatrum chemicum britannicum.8
Close analysis of the dog-earing and annotations in the Trinity volumes—for Newton had
no compunction about turning page corners down or up, not just to mark pages but to make
the folded corner point directly to particular words or passages, or about filling margins and
flyleaves with his own annotations—might well supply pointers to other sources not
explicitly referenced in the document. It would be interesting to know whether the individual
pages referred to in MM/6/5 show particular signs of dog-earing or annotation. One would
also wish to collate the document with all Newton’s other surviving alchemical manuscripts,
for (as I explain below) I think it likely that this was not originally conceived as a single
document but is a conflation of two or more fragments. If so, the missing pieces of the jigsaw
may yet turn up somewhere among the many collections of Newtonian alchemy scattered
around Europe and North America. Close scientific analysis of the handwriting, ink and paper
could yield further clues about the date of the manuscript, or of its component parts if it was
not originally a single manuscript.
In the catalogue of the 1936 Sotheby sale—a work compiled at breakneck speed by the
Sotheby cataloguer John Taylor, who was not himself a specialist in alchemy—the
description of this manuscript reads, in its entirety:
Extracts from the Works of Faber and other Alchemical Writers [in Latin and English]
about 7000 words, 2 pp. 4to and 20 pp. folio, Autograph.9
Taylor’s description does not tally perfectly with the document unearthed by MacFarlane.
An electronic word count of my transcription shows that the number of words is in fact
around 12 400—more than 150% of the figure estimated by Taylor. Of the 32 individual
sides, 24 (not 22) are written on. Although ‘Faber’ (of whom more below) is indeed the most
frequently and lengthily cited source in the document, looming large in ff. 1–5, 9 and 13–14,
there is little mention of him elsewhere in the manuscript. This might suggest that my
equation of this manuscript with Sotheby Lot 22 is arguable, but the discrepancies are in fact
wholly explicable and even to be expected.
Taylor’s catalogue was the last comprehensive account of Newton’s non-‘scientific’
papers until the release of the online Newton Project catalogue in November 2001,10 and
remains the best account there is of the manuscripts which vanished into unknown hands after
the sale—of which, until MacFarlane’s discovery, this was thought to be one. Given the
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28 J. T. Young

circumstances of its compilation, the Taylor catalogue is an extraordinary achievement

containing astonishingly few errors, but it is consistently inaccurate in certain respects and
frustratingly unforthcoming in others.11
Taylor seems to have assumed, as a rule of thumb, that a single folio page will contain
about 300–350 words; in reality, Newton was quite capable of squeezing over 600 words onto
such a page. Taylor’s word counts almost invariably come out somewhere between half and
two-thirds of the true total in the now numerous cases where later transcription has made it
possible to verify word counts electronically.12 In his page counts, Taylor consistently
disregards pages with only a few lines written on them, which accounts for the omission of
two pages (doubtless ff. 8r and 9v). Given all this, there can be no serious doubt that the
manuscript bought by the Royal Society from Edwards in 1939 is identical with that bought
by Edwards at the Sotheby sale three years earlier.
I have, however, several reasons for suspecting this to be a conflation of at least two
documents, and perhaps a conflation of several. Given the history of Newton’s archive, this
would not in itself be at all surprising or unusual. Shortly after Newton’s death, his
manuscripts were inspected and quite possibly rearranged by Thomas Pellet, who evidently
had little interest in alchemy and less understanding of it.13 Though he did not go so far as to
discard or destroy the alchemical papers, he may very well occasionally have shuffled some
of them carelessly into an ill-organized heap. There is no knowing who did what with
Newton’s papers over the next century and a half. In 1872 the manuscript was among the
papers offered for inspection to a committee of scientists appointed by Cambridge
University,14 and it is again possible that some confusion occurred during the inspection
(which lasted several years in total), or during the transferral of the papers to or from
Cambridge. Because none of the pages of MM/6/5 bears a number, it would have been easy to
overlook such disordering and difficult to rectify it even if it had been noticed.
Like almost any serious European scholar of his time, Newton was as much at home in
Latin as in his native language, and switched readily between the two, but the linguistic
profile of MM/6/5 would be decidedly odd if it were a single, self-contained production. Most
pages are wholly in Latin; others are wholly in English, and other pages again consist of
citations in Latin linked by English text. It is surely significant that these linguistic
disjunctures consistently coincide with page breaks. One page (f. 6v) breaks off in mid-
sentence, ending with a catchword that connects to nothing else in the document. Another
page (f. 8v) actually manages to start twice in mid-sentence (or at least in mid-paragraph), one
textual fragment beginning at the top of the page, and the other, which is written upside down,
at the bottom. Neither has any apparent antecedent elsewhere in the document. This strongly
suggests that the pages had become disordered, and in some cases perhaps detached
from their rightful place in Newton’s archive, at some point between their original
composition and 1936.

NEWTON’S SOURCES AND RELATED MANUSCRIPTS

Some account is called for of this ‘Faber’ who is certainly the principal source of almost
half the manuscript, even if the other half has been spuriously intertwined with it. A number
of ‘chymical’ writers went by the name of ‘Faber’, but the titles cited by Newton make it
clear that this one is Pierre Jean Fabré of Castelnaudary in Languedoc. Not much is known
about him. He was still alive, although very ill, in late January 1656.15 He had been
physician to Louis XIII of France for a time, and is described by J. R. Partington, in his
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Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes 29

authoritative History of chemistry, as having written ‘a large number of little-esteemed

works’.16 Lynn Thorndike, in her History of magic and experimental science, is no more
complimentary.17
Partington and Thorndike would surely have been astonished to learn that Isaac Newton
not only read but made copious notes on these ‘little-esteemed works’: one of the copy
extracts from Fabré’s Panchymici seu anatomiæ totius universa . opus in MM/6/5 runs to
over 1000 words. Newton’s copy of the 1652 two-volume Frankfurt am Main edition of
Fabré’s complete works (in Latin) is among the volumes still held in Trinity College, and
shows extensive signs of dog-earing. Volume 1 also bears, on the flyleaf, a note in Newton’s
hand of the order in which Fabré’s works had first been printed.18
Moreover, this is by no means the only surviving Newton manuscript to make frequent
mention of Fabré. Two others are in the Dibner Library in the Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, with the call numbers NMAHRB 1024B and 1070A. The general tenor of the
latter in particular, and the other sources cited in it alongside Fabré, reveal a very striking
similarity to MM/6/5. So do the tenor and references of Babson Ms 417 in the Burndy
Library,19 another important and substantial alchemical manuscript by Newton. It would be
well worth while to compare these documents with that in the Royal Society Library, looking
for redraftings and missing links. Two smaller documents listed in the 1936 Sotheby
catalogue as mentioning ‘Faber’ (probably meaning Fabré again), Lots 29 and 67, are now in
unknown private hands and beyond the reach of scholarship.
Even in the sections for which Fabré is the acknowledged primary source, however,
Newton repeatedly interrupts the exposition to supplement or contrast Fabré’s theories and
procedural directions with those of a host of his (Newton’s) other favourite alchemical
sources, notably ‘Philalethes’ (namely George Starkey, although Newton could almost
certainly not have known this), the Triomphe hermetique of Alexandre Toussaint de Limojon,
John de Monte Snyders, Ramón Lull (whom Newton often calls ‘Raymundus’), Hadrianus a
Mynsicht (whom Newton consistently miscalls ‘Minschict’), Arnoldus de Villanova, Basil
Valentine, Roger Bacon, and assorted anonymous texts from Zetzner’s Theatrum chemicum.
As I said, this is not the place to venture a full account of the document’s contents. It is
clear, however, that in all or almost all of its pages, Newton is more or less directly pursuing a
theory that was dear to his heart and to the hearts of many ‘chymical’ writers among his
contemporaries and forebears. This is the notion of a ‘vegetative’ operation in Nature not
exclusive to the plant and animal kingdoms but also at work in the mineral. Just as plants and
animals grow and mutate and interact sexually with other plants and animals to produce new
strains and species, so do metals and other apparently ‘inanimate’ forms of matter. This was
the process set in motion by God to generate from the initial Chaos of Genesis 1 (‘the earth
was without form, and void’) the created world as we now know it.
The alchemist’s goal was to reduce matter again to this state of primal chaos and then re-
‘create’ or regenerate it in a new and exalted form—and the terms ‘chaos’ and ‘chaos
philosophorum’ recur with striking frequency in MM/6/5. This operation was not explicable
in terms of the strictly ‘mechanical’ philosophy of which Newton is so often considered a
champion, but entailed deeper insights into the nature both of matter and of God himself.
This, rather than the get-rich-quick trick of turning iron or lead into gold, was what really
fascinated serious alchemists such as Newton. His fullest account of this theory is to be found
in another manuscript in the Smithsonian, NMAHRB 1031B, one of the few ‘chymical’
manuscripts in Newton’s hand still generally accepted as being largely his own work,20 and
which also seems to have affinities with parts at least of the Royal Society manuscript,
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30 J. T. Young

especially ff. 10r and 15v—but again, a detailed comparative study is needed before anything
definitive can be said.

A DESCRIPTION OF THE MANUSCRIPT

To conclude, it seems worth giving a fairly detailed account of the document in terms of both
its content and its physical makeup.
The first four folios, which comprise two bifoliums, clearly do form a coherent whole,
being a collection of copy extracts in Latin. In the first two folios the citations are almost all
from Fabré, though the Triomphe hermetique cited in the second paragraph (without
attribution) is by Alexandre Toussaint de Limojon de Saint-Didier. Newton owned a much
dog-eared copy of this work, which was published in 1689: an important fact, because it gives
an earliest possible date for this part at least of the manuscript.21 The last paragraph of f. 2v
seems to be Newton’s own notes on discrepancies between Fabré and various other sources.
In the next two folios, further Fabré citations are interwoven with extracts from a number of
other writers, chiefly Johannes Grassæus.22 The notes become steadily shorter and more
fragmentary and the sources increasingly numerous. One can almost sense Newton’s
mounting excitement as he identifies more and more works concerning what he takes to be the
same subject. One paragraph on f. 3v seems again to be Newton’s own commentary on the
similarities and discrepancies between his sources. Folio 4 is blank.
Folios 5–6 form a third bifolium, are also in Latin, and clearly form a self-contained
whole, but their content is markedly different from the foregoing. As in ff. 1–4 there are
extensive source references, and Fabré still features on f. 5r, but Newton was evidently not
simply copying text out as he had been in the previous pages. In ff. 1–4, the few manuscript
corrections are to errors typically committed by anyone copying a text verbatim: eye-skip,
repetition and the like, errors embarrassingly familiar to any professional transcriber. The
far denser level of deletion, insertion and revision evident in ff. 5 and 6 suggests that
although here too Newton is working almost exclusively from source texts to which he
gives detailed references, he is not just transcribing but struggling to arrange his disparate
sources in an order that will render them coherent and mutually illuminating. He is, so to
speak, working on a collage of quotations and references that will add up to more than the
sum of its parts.
Folios 7–8 are a fourth bifolium, still exclusively in Latin, in which the text becomes even
scrappier, even more cryptic and even more disjointed. The material on f. 8v is clearly related
to that on f. 7r although not to the intervening fragmentary notes on various tracts in the
Theatrum chemicum on f. 8r, which Taylor probably disregarded in his page count. The
sentence ‘Serpens devorat Cadmum cum socijs’ (‘The snake devours Cadmus along with his
companions’), from the Introitus apertus ad occlusum regis palatium of ‘Philalethes’, deleted
on f. 7r, reappears undeleted on f. 8v. Folio 7v is blank. The number of sources referenced
begins to swell out of hand: ‘Philalethes’, Lull, Arnoldus de Villanova, Nicolas Flamel, John
de Monte Snyders, Lorenzo Ventura, Ferrar, George Ripley, Morienus, and any number of
unattributed works from the Theatrum chemicum. Newton increasingly seems to be citing
references from memory, leaving blank spaces in which to add volume, chapter and page
references retrospectively. There is much discussion of the meaning of arcane alchemical
code-words such as ‘Duenech, Kukul, Taabritis, Ebisneth’ (f. 8v).
Up to this point, the paper of the manuscript at least, however diverse its content, is of a
consistent size and character. Folio 9, a loose sheet, is on totally different paper, although in
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Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes 31

terms of style and content it seems closely related to ff. 1–4. Fabré takes centre stage again, as
he does once more in ff. 13–14. There are only two lines of text on f. 9v, which is doubtless
the other page disregarded by Taylor in his page count.
Folio 10 is another loose sheet, on different paper again, and constitutes a grammatically
coherent, self-contained text in English with no source references. This makes for a very striking
contrast in terms of both language and presentation to all the foregoing, and comprises perhaps
the most intriguing and suggestive section of the whole document. I was initially inclined to
think that this passage might just be Newton’s own composition, but was rescued by the
admirable scholarship of the same William Newman who corrected Betty Dobbs’s
misattribution of the ‘Clavis’—and by Newman’s generosity in sharing his findings with me,
for which I would like to record my heartfelt thanks. The passage is almost word-for-word
identical with one unearthed by Newman in the British Library, Sloane MS 3711, f. 84r-v,
headed ‘A Coppy of a paper wch Capt: Hylliard presented to Mr: Is: Newton Warden of ye Mint’.
This Captain Hylliard remains otherwise obscure, and the hand of the British Library
manuscript remains unidentified (it is certainly not Newton’s), but the reference to Newton as
Warden of the Mint dates the passage (or at least Newton’s copy of it) to between 19 March
1696 and 25 December 1699, those being the dates between which he held this office. After
leaving Cambridge for London to take up the post, Newton no longer kept a laboratory of his
own and seems to have abandoned practical alchemical experimentation, but he continued to
make notes and collect literature on the subject, and to cultivate contacts with people who
were involved in such experiments.23 The obvious similarities between this extract and
Newton’s own study of ‘Natures obvious laws & processes in vegetation’20 will undoubtedly
repay further investigation. Identification of the mysterious Captain Hylliard might well shed
new light on Newton’s alchemical contacts and his involvement in the culture of ‘scribal
publication’—the dissemination of unpublished works in manuscript copy—which remained
such an important feature of scholarly life, especially in the secretive world of the alchemists,
at least until well into the eighteenth century.
Folio 10v is blank. Folio 11, another loose sheet, compares and contrasts several extracts
from the anonymous Turba philosophorum, an influential alchemical work included in the
Theatrum chemicum (vol. 5, pp. 1–51). The extracts are cited in the original Latin but
introduced or linked by what is presumably Newton’s own text in English. Folio 11v is blank.
Folio 12, again a loose sheet, is another self-contained passage in English, incongruously
interrupted on f. 12r by a line of jotted calculations bearing no apparent relation to the
surrounding material. As on f. 10r, the language is comparatively plain and literal, with none
of the allegorical circumlocutions so characteristic of the acknowledged Latin extracts.
However, the large number of page references cited in or at the end of every paragraph except
the last strongly suggests that Newton is in fact either citing or paraphrasing another author,
whose identity he does not state. The frequent insertions and deletions suggest paraphrase
rather than straight copying, or perhaps a mixture of the two. The text is largely identical with
another document in Newton’s hand entitled ‘Out of La Lumiere sortant des Tenebres’, a
selection of translated extracts or abstracts of the anonymous La lumière sortant par soy
même des tenebres (1687), which is itself a translation of a Latin translation of and
commentary on an original text in Italian verse possibly by Otto Tachenius.24 Again, this
provides an earliest possible date for this portion of the manuscript.
Folios 13–14 are a bifolium, though most of f. 14 has been cut off—it is not obvious when
or by whom, or whether there was originally any text on the missing portion. The language
reverts to Latin, Fabré resurfaces, the low level of textual revision suggests straight copying
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32 J. T. Young

from various explicitly cited sources, and it seems clear that this part of the manuscript does
indeed belong with ff. 1–4 and 9. There is a particularly intriguing allegorical passage on
f. 14r about a dead woman suckling a toad. Folio 14v is blank.
Folios 15–16 (of which f. 16 is blank) constitute the final bifolium and are once again in
English. The first two fragmentary paragraphs, and another in the middle of f. 15r, concern
heathen oracles and the supposed etymological connections between the names of Greek and
Latin gods and of the Hebrew one—subjects with no apparent relation to anything else in this
manuscript but which Newton wrote about extensively in several of his theological treatises.
Apart from these brief digressions, the style and subject matter remain wholly alchemical.
The ‘Questions’, ‘Answers’ and ‘Notes’ on f. 15 are the sort of thing that must have given
David Brewster nightmares. ‘In the short way how much superior waters in every eagle[?]’
was not the sort of question he expected the great Sir Isaac to ask. As I said before, it would be
rash to assume that Newton was indeed asking it himself rather than citing it from an
unspecified source—but even in the latter case, it was clearly a question he thought it worth
noting and considering.
This section evidently concerns an alchemical process allegorically described in an
unspecified work. Although the ‘Answers’ and ‘Notes’ are couched in the same abstruse
allegorical language as the ‘Questions’, they do sound very much like the account of an
attempt to replicate this process in the laboratory. In particular, note 5 on f. 15r smacks
strongly of first-hand experience, with a suggestion that the results had not been quite what
was expected: ‘The black matter in the egg in the middle of the 5t digestion tasted pungent not
corrosive’. As in ff. 1–4, 9 and 13 and 14, the very low level of textual revision provides near-
conclusive proof that Newton was copying or writing up from another source text, but it
remains to be established whether that other text comprised his own laboratory notes or
somebody else’s.
This paper can do no more than scratch the surface of the many mysteries concealed in the
pages of MM/6/5. A full analysis will be the work of a far lengthier and more detailed study
by a scholar better equipped for the task than I am.

NOTES
1 David Brewster, Memoirs of the life, writings, and discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Thomas
Constable & Co., Edinburgh, 1855), vol. 2, pp. 374–375.
2 For details of the sale, see Rob Iliffe and John Young, ‘Newton on the Net: first and prospective
fruits of a Royal Society grant’, Notes Rec. R. Soc. 58, 83–88 (2004), pp. 84–85.
3 The Royal Society Newton tercentenary celebrations 15–19 July 1946 (Cambridge University
Press, 1947), pp. 27–34, at p. 27. (World War II had caused the ‘tercentenary celebrations’ of
Newton’s birth in 1642 to be deferred by four years.)
4 Michael White, Isaac Newton: the last sorcerer (Fourth Estate, London, 1997); Louis Verlet,
La malle de Newton (Gallimard, Paris, 1993); documentary in the BBC’s ‘Great Britons’ series
broadcast on 15 November 2002; ‘Newton, the dark heretic’ (also BBC) broadcast on 1 March
2003.
5 B. J. T. Dobbs, The foundations of Newton’s alchemy: or ‘The Hunting of the Greene Lyon’
(Cambridge University Press, 1975), passim, and W. R. Newman, ‘Newton’s “Clavis” as
Starkey’s “Key”’, Isis 78, 564–574 (1987). Dobbs acknowledged Newman’s reattribution in The
Janus faces of genius: the role of alchemy in Newton’s thought (Cambridge University Press,
1991), p. 15. The manuscript in question is Keynes Ms. 18 in King’s College, Cambridge. Starkey
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Isaac Newton’s alchemical notes 33

was dragged out of his own wilful obscurity (both historically and semantically) by Newman’s
Gehennical fire: the lives of George Starkey, an alchemist of Harvard in the scientific revolution
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994).
6 J. Harrison, The library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, 1978); see also K. Figala,
J. Harrison and U. Petzold, ‘De Scriptoribus Chemicis: sources for the establishment of Isaac
Newton’s (al)chemical library’, in The investigation of difficult things: essays on Newton and
the history of the exact sciences, in honour of D. T. Whiteside (ed. P. Harman and A. E. Shapiro),
pp. 135–179 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
7 See Harrison, op. cit. (note 6), entry 1608, for details of Newton’s copy of this work, which was
published in 1659–61 and of which Newton bought a copy in 1669 (the purchase is recorded in a
notebook in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, f. 8v).
8 Published 1652: for Newton’s copy, see Harrison, op. cit. (note 6), entry 93.
9 [John Taylor], Catalogue of the Newton papers sold by order of the Viscount Lymington
(Sotheby, London, 1936), p. 4.
10 Compiled by Rob Iliffe, Peter Spargo and John Young. It can be accessed from www.
newtonproject.ic.ac.uk. At the time of writing, the Newton Project website is undergoing a major
upgrade that will entail changes to the URLs of almost all its individual pages before this article is
published, so I am not citing these. The URL of the homepage, however, should remain stable,
and if Mike Hawkins and I have not been completely wasting our time for the past three months it
should be easy to navigate from there to any of the pages referenced in this article.
11 For an account of the circumstances of the composition of Taylor’s catalogue, see P. Spargo,
‘Sotheby’s, Keynes and Yahuda—the 1936 sale of Newton’s manuscripts’, in Harman and
Shapiro, op. cit. (note 6), pp. 115–134.
12 A number of sources state, on the basis of Taylor’s estimates, that Newton wrote about 1 300 000
words on theology and over half a million on alchemy. This can be increased (if one includes
deletions, revisions and redraftings) to something more like two and a half million on theology
and more than a million on alchemy.
13 Pellet, a Fellow of the Royal Society, had been appointed by the administrators of Newton’s
estate to assess how much of the manuscript legacy was fit for publication. None of the
alchemical material was, in his view. See R. S. Westfall, Never at rest: a biography of Isaac
Newton (Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 872–873.
14 See Iliffe and Young, op. cit. (note 2), p. 84.
15 The alchemist Erasmus Rasch, in a letter to Samuel Hartlib, 26 Jan. 1656, spoke of having
recently visited Fabré on his sick-bed, remarking somewhat uncharitably that the fact he was so
ill did little to inspire confidence in his abilities as a practitioner of chemical medicine (Hartlib
Papers 42/9/1B, in Sheffield University Library and available as facsimiles and transcriptions on
The Hartlib papers on CD-ROM (ed. Judith Crawford, Mark Greengrass and Michael Leslie)
(HROnline, Sheffield, 2002)). See also my Faith, medical alchemy and natural philosophy:
Johann Moriaen, reformed intelligencer, and the Hartlib circle (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998), p. 79
(esp. note 39).
16 J. R. Partington, A history of chemistry (Macmillan, London, 1961), vol. 2, p. 181.
17 Lynn Thorndike, A history of magic and experimental science (Columbia University Press,
New York, 1958), vol. 8, p. 194–195.
18 See Harrison, op. cit. (note 6), entry 598.
19 The Burndy Library is currently housed by the Dibner Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
but will shortly be moving to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
20 A facsimile reproduction of this manuscript forms the appendix to B. J. T. Dobbs, Alchemical
death and resurrection: the significance of alchemy in the age of Newton (Smithsonian Institution
Libraries, Washington DC, 1990); there is a transcript (minus the document’s short Latin
appendix) and detailed account of it in her Janus faces of genius (op. cit., note 5), pp. 256–270.
Dobbs gives it the title ‘Of natures obvious laws & processes in vegetation’, though this is in
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34 J. T. Young

fact the heading of only the first of the document’s 12 subsections. See also Dobbs’s
‘Newtonian manuscripts at the Smithsonian Institution’, Isis 68, 105–107 (1977), and Piyo
Rattansi, ‘Newton’s alchemical studies’, in Science, medicine and society in the Renaissance
(ed. A. Debus) (Heinemann, London, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 167–182.
21 Harrison, op. cit. (note 6), entry 1642. Newton also had a manuscript Latin translation of part of
this work (King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes Ms. 23), a 35-page commentary in his own hand
on Limojon’s ‘Six Keys’ (Keynes Ms. 21), and a printed copy of Limojon’s Lettre d’un
philosophe sur le secret du grand oeuvre (Harrison, entry 950).
22 Newton is not known to have owned any free-standing works by Grassæus, but his Arca arcani,
which Newton mentions several times, is in the Theatrum chemicum, vol. 6, pp. 294–322.
23 See K. Figala, ‘Zwei Londoner Alchemisten um 1700: Sir Isaac Newton und Cleidophorus
Mystagogus’, Physis 18, 245–273 (1976), and K. Figala and U. Petzold, ‘Alchemy in the
Newtonian circle: personal acquaintances and the problem of the late phase of Isaac Newton’s
alchemy’, in Renaissance and revolution: humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural
philosophers in early modern Europe (ed. J. V. Field and F. James), pp. 173–191 (Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
24 See Harrison, op. cit. (note 6), entry 1003 for Newton’s copy of this work. Newton’s own notes
were dismembered at some point before the Sotheby sale and sold as two separate lots: they are
now Yahuda Var. 1 Ms. 30 in the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, and Babson
Ms. 414B in the Burndy Library. The complete, reconstructed text is transcribed with valuable
introductory notes in Dobbs, op. cit. (note 5) Janus faces of genius, pp. 278–287. My thanks are
again due to William Newman for pointing out the close similarity between this text and the RS
manuscript.