ortal work, the "Principia."

The sublimest conclusion which Newton drew from his cautious and
successful investigations of the laws of nature is put, with his
characteristic humility, in the form of a query: "These things being
rightly described, does it not appear from the phenomena that there is a
Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who, in infinite
space (as it were in His sensory), sees the things themselves
intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly
by their immediate presence to Himself?"

Newton spent his last days in Kensington. "I was, Sunday night," says
his nephew, "March 7, 1725, at Kensington, with Sir Isaac Newton in his
lodgings, just after he was come out of a fit of the gout, which he had
in both of his feet for the first time, in the eighty-third year of his
age. He was better after it, and had his health clearer and memory
stronger than I had known them for some years." A year later the same
diarist says: "April 15, 1726. I passed the whole day with Sir Isaac
Newton, at his lodgings, Orbell's Buildings, Kensington, which was the
last time I saw him." The house was lately in existence, situated in
what is called Bullingham Place, retaining, when we visited it, a
mansion-like aspect, with a large garden and tall trees. There he died,
March 20, 1727, having on the previous day been able to read the
newspaper and to hold a long conversation with Dr. Mead.

His body was laid in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and then buried in
Westminster Abbey.

PETER THE GREAT

(1672-1725)

[Illustration: Peter the Great. [TN]]

At the close of the sixteenth century, the dominions of Russia, or
Muscovy, as it was then more generally called, were far thrown back from
the more civilized nations of southern Europe, by the intervention of
Lithuania, Livonia, and other provinces now incorporated in the Russian
empire, but then belonging either to Sweden or Poland. The Czar of
Muscovy, therefore, possessed no political weight in the affairs of
Europe, and little intercourse existed between the court of Moscow and
the more polished potentates whom it affected to despise as barbarians,
even for some time after the accession of the reigning dynasty, the
house of Romanoff, in 1613, and the establishment of a more regular
government than had previously been known. We only read occasionally of
embassies being sent to Moscow, in general for the purpose of arranging
comme