e road and sat under a hedge, reading or making
some model, until his companion returned.

We hear of him now in the great storm of 1658, the storm on the day
Cromwell died, measuring the force of the wind by seeing how far he
could jump with it and against it. He also made a water-clock and set it
up in the house at Grantham, where it kept fairly good time so long as
he was in the neighbourhood to look after it occasionally.

At his own home he made a couple of sundials on the side of the wall (he
began by marking the position of the sun by the shadow of a peg driven
into the wall, but this gradually developed into a regular dial) one of
which remained of use for some time; and was still to be seen in the
same place during the first half of the present century, only with the
gnomon gone. In 1844 the stone on which it was carved was carefully
extracted and presented to the Royal Society, who preserve it in their
library. The letters WTON roughly carved on it are barely visible.

All these pursuits must have been rather trying to his poor mother, and
she probably complained to her brother, the rector of Burton Coggles:
at any rate this gentleman found master Newton one morning under a hedge
when he ought to have been farming. But as he found him working away at
mathematics, like a wise man he persuaded his sister to send the boy
back to school for a short time, and then to Cambridge. On the day of
his finally leaving school old Mr. Stokes assembled the boys, made them
a speech in praise of Newton's character and ability, and then dismissed
him to Cambridge.

At Trinity College a new world opened out before the country-bred lad.
He knew his classics passably, but of mathematics and science he was
ignorant, except through the smatterings he had picked up for himself.
He devoured a book on logic, and another on Kepler's Optics, so fast
that his attendance at lectures on these subjects became unnecessary. He
also got hold of a Euclid and of Descartes's Geometry. The Euclid seemed
childishly easy, and was thrown aside, but the Descartes baffled him for
a time. However, he set to it again and again and before long mastered
it. He threw himself heart and soul into mathematics, and very soon made
some remarkable discoveries. First he discovered the binomial theorem:
familiar now to all who have done any algebra, unintelligible to others,
and therefore I say nothing about it. By the age of twenty-one or two he
had begun his gr