Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of
progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz,
Newton, and himself. Watt could have given in pounds the increase
of power between Newcomen's engines and his own. Volta and
Benjamin Franklin would have stated their progress as absolute
creation of power. Dalton could have measured minutely his
advance on Boerhaave. Napoleon I must have had a distinct notion
of his own numerical relation to Louis XIV. No one in 1789
doubted the progress of force, least of all those who were to
lose their heads by it.
Pending agreement between these authorities, theory may assume
what it likes -- say a fifty, or even a five-and-twenty-year
period of reduplication for the eighteenth century, for the
period matters little until the acceleration itself is admitted.
The subject is even more amusing in the seventeenth than in the
eighteenth century, because Galileo and Kepler, Descartes,
Huygens, and Isaac Newton took vast pains to fix the laws of
acceleration for moving bodies, while Lord Bacon and William
Harvey were content with showing experimentally the fact of
acceleration in knowledge; but from their combined results a
historian might be tempted to maintain a similar rate of movement
back to 1600, subject to correction from the historians of
mathematics.
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