ISAAC Newton was born eighteen and a half years before he entered Cambridge, early on Christmas Day 1642, in the manor house of Woolsthorpe near the village of Colsterworth, seven miles south of Grantham in Lincolnshire. Since Galileo, on whose discoveries much of Newton's own career in science would squarely rest, had died that year, a significance attaches itself to 1642. I am far from the first to note it – and will be undoubtedly far from the last. Born in 1564, Galileo had lived nearly to eighty. Newton would live nearly to eighty-five. Between them they virtually spanned the entire scientific revolution, the central core of which their combined work constituted. In fact, only England's stiff-necked Protestantism permitted the chronological liaison. Because it considered that popery had fatally contaminated the Gregorian calendar, England was ten days out of phase with the Continent, where it was 4 January 1643 the day Newton was born. We can sacrifice the symbol without losing anything of substance. It matters only that he was born and at such a time that he could utilize Galileo's work.

Prior to Isaac, the Newton family was wholly without distinction and wholly without learning. Since it knew steady economic advance during the century prior to Isaac's birth, we may assume that it was not without diligence and not without the intelligence that can make diligence fruitful.