NEWTON’S REPEATED PROTESTATION that he was engaged in other studies supplied an ever–present theme to his correspondence of the 1670s. Already in July 1672, only six months after the Royal Society discovered him to be a man supremely skilled in optics, he wrote to Oldenburg that he doubted he would make further trials with telescopes, “ being desirous to prosecute some other subjects.” Three-and-a-half years later, he put off the composition of a general treatise on colors because of unspecified obligations and some “ buisines of my own wch at present almost take up my time & thoughts.” Apparently the other business was not mathematics, because later in 1676 he hoped the second letter for Leibniz would be the last. “ ...
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