The illustrations in the book on alchemy (Rosarium philosophorum, Frankfurt 1550) refer to transmutation processes. For example, the (green) lion devouring the sun is a common way of showing aqua regia (regal or royal water) dissolving gold. If you're interested in these images, I recommend Jennifer Rampling's 'The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700' (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Brady, I have in my library a tome on Euclidean Geometry. By itself, its not interesting. However, it comes from the library of Nevil Maskelyne, Member of the Royal Society, Fifth Astronomer Royal and one of the persons instrumental in solving the Longitude problem. I keep it carefully wrapped up and preserved. It remains one of the treasures of my library!
@@karina4747 Nevil Maskelyne signed (!) the book and it is for this reason I can be sure that the great man himself touched the book. There is little evidence he read it. Frankly, after devising a thoroughly workable lunars solution to longitude, which involves quite a bit of spherical trigonometry, a book on Euclidian trig may have held little interest for him. At least, that's my guess. For those interested in the lunars method for solving longitude, an excellent resource is NavList. Because the moon moves fairly rapidly against the heavens, we can measure the angular distance to other known celestial bodies. This swiftness of motion and angular distance provides the key to longitude. I won't bore the reader with the elegant mathematics. John Harrison invented the marine chronometer at nearly the same time, and the ease of the chronometer won out against the math. The math takes ~20 minutes to resolve without a calculator, but having time directly from the chronometer is much faster.
Absolutely loved this! Rupert was hilarious with his dog-ear naming (carried on magnificently by Brady of course), and just so interesting to see the evidence of Newton interacting with books like this!
I had no idea that folding the corners of book sheets is called "dog earring" :0 (I'm from a non English speaking country) It is always amazing to know that objects connect people through time in this way ❤️
@@klausolekristiansen2960 Perhaps you and others would be happy to know that PDF does indeed support dog ears. There are plugins for each of the popular PDF readers to add support for it. However PDF bookmarks have long since surpassed dog ears in functionality so some of those plugins may no longer be supported or even work.
@@pharynx007 Modern books are printed in the hundres of thousands sometimes millions. Opening and using a book damages it. A book should be used and enjoyed not treated like a musum artifact from the moment it was printed. If not it might as well be fuel. Dog ear your books crack the spines write notes in the margins. That is what books are for.
No to dog ears ! Defacing books is bad , when I needed to..I would "tq" the I side margin !..when the professor read the book out loud , teachers quote. As in this will be on the test - this is what's most important to the brain testing me soon ...
I'm pretty sure the symbols at 6:44 are the symbols for the moon Mercury, Venus, the sun Jupiter, Saturn And alchemically, it would mean silver mercury, copper, gold tin, lead
I would give credit to the "dog ear pointing at specific word" theory if the dog ears were of markedly different sizes, and some pointed to words near the binding while others pointed to words near the edge of the pages.
I always dog ear to save pages and I will never stop. Unless it's borrowed from a friend or library then I write the number down in my phone because book marks annoy me for some reason
I like that Newton both dogeared and annotated his books. He was a voracious scholar and the books were his tools, and he used them as such, even to the extent of writing his own index to make his study quicker. His books were a means to an end, not ends in themselves. He studied them and marked passages that were of particular note to him. I doubt that he was in the least concerned what happened to them after his death. They were relevant to him and his interests and likely saw them as not of any great historical importance. After all, these weren't some great works of fiction or poetry, they were essentially manuals to scientific understanding, much as a dictionary is to understanding words. I know I'm not overly careful with dictionaries, or physics books, or engineering books. I'm certainly not very concerned about their condition, or if I were to spill tea on them. Newton undoubtedly never saw himself as an historic figure, to be revered by future generations who would clamour for anything he made, wrote, touched or was associated with. These books from his library are prized by association, and I imagine a great many were of much lesser intrinsic value in and of themselves, they being of value mostly by virtue of their age and rarity, unless the author was also notably famous. He didn't just read books, he used books.
It is rare but not unheard of. Newton believed, as many did at the time, that Hebrew was one of the oldest languages and thus closest to "Adamic" the prime, almost divine, original language.
Those symbols had an additional meaning in alchemy, referring to various substances. The moon referred to silver. Mercury is also, well, what we now call mercury -- quicksilver. Venus is copper. The sun is gold. Jupiter is tin. Saturn is lead. These are fairly common, but there are a large number of other symbols, and each alchemist often had their own conventions, as I understand it, often to keep things secret to themselves.
Forget Newton. I wanna see some non-euclidian dogears. But seriously, Did anybody catalog what did Newton bookmark? If those pages had any particular importance?
That weird picture with the 'heads on sticks" is the alchemical corruption of the original Naga symbols for the Genesis story. It's a story about a massive volcanic eruption that wiped out previous civilizations, including the one on the Antarctic continent, and the family that survived it. Eve is actually Adam's daughter in the Naga and Aboriginal versions of the story which are where the Christians stole it from.
If you have ever read a book in bed until your eyes just couldn't be forced open, you would understand why the man would "dog ear" the page in order to point the corner of the page to the paragraph to read next.
I wonder if any of those 16th century books were bound with human skin. I recently read that some such bound books were found in one of Harvard's collections.
Also note that the letter 's' in those books looks like an 'f', as they did back then. Makes sense that the symbols for the planets might not yet have been standardized.
I used to fold pages to point to specific sections in exactly the same way. Fortunately I learnt better by the time I entered my mid-teens. Unfortunately, this terrible habit is the only thing I have ever had in common with Newton.
It's often been noted that whilst a genius Newton was also a fairly terrible human being in a lot of ways. Up to now this has been largely anecdotal, however physical proof that he "dog-eared" books confirms it.
"Naturvetenskapens Matematiska Principer"... Yeah, that's pretty much Scandinavian... Swedish to be more precise... And I am sure noone else in the comments have confirmed this so I can go on into youtube legends... Like the first one who commented "first!"...
Bagana - Most typewriters of the day didn't have a '1', but the usual convention was to use 'l' (lower-case L) rather than "I" (upper-case I). Whoever typed the note wasn't a professional typist.
@@Tevildo Indeed, and when small computers first came into general use, the manuals (remember manuals) used to point out, insistently, that you needed to type a proper numeral "1", not use "l" lower case. BTW, in the font on my screen at the moment, there's no *visible* difference between lc "l" and uc "i"; and what's the odds that that is an uc "O" rather than a proper zero? In the 1980s, this sort of stuff mattered, on a daily basis--you couldn't do searches properly unless you got it right.
You never want to handle old books and paper with gloves because you risk damaging or tearing the paper from being too forceful with it. You lose a lot of the fine touch sensation wearing gloves so you might end up tugging on a page just a little too hard. This was addressed in some of Brady's earlier videos.
Indeed. It’s a trade-off, ideally you would want to preserve the pages somehow and never touch them but that’s not what the society is about, they believe all this information was meant to be read and shared. Which I love, hope to visit it once.
