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Sale 46
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Lot 332
Great Britain. Guinea, 1687. S-3402; Fr-295; KM-459.1. James II, 1685-1688. Second Bust. Laureate head left. Reverse: Crowned cruciform arms, with alternating scepters at angles. Another particularly choice example, in a very rare grade. NGC graded MS-63.
The Great Plague that ravaged London early in the reign of James's brother, Charles II, was in terms of human and economic loss among the worst tragedies the English realm had suffered in recent centuries. Yet in the quirky happenings of the serendipitous, the disaster proved a most fortuitous boon to science. Because of the long history of recurrent episodes of plague in London and its well-known high fatality rate, at first rumor of a new outbreak those who could fled to new localities to wait out the epidemic's course. In 1665, Cambridge University closed and dispersed students and faculty to various distant regions of England. Among those Cambridge University students was Isaac Newton, a genius who had already made a reputation for himself at school for his mathematical skills, which are thought to have often been superior to those of his instructors. Newton returned to his widowed mother's home in Lincolnshire to sit out the Great Plague. During his eighteen months there, this young college student (23 at the time) had time to reflect and eventually to formulate laws of force and motion that would revolutionize scientific knowledge in the 17th century, and lay in essence the foundations for modern science.
Newton's scientific breakthrough occurred when he made a connection between two phenomena that no one had ever previously connected: the motion of the Moon around the Earth, and the falling motion of an apple from a tree. The brilliance in this correspondence was that Newton equated moon's motion with "falling," like that of the apple's. He would hypothesize that some mysterious property of the Earth caused the motions of both the apple falling to the ground and the moon orbiting the Earth. This mysterious property was attributed to gravity, an ever-acting force of attraction inherent to all objects. Newton's revolutionary laws were published in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, some 20 years after his brief leave from Cambridge University due to the bubonic plague.
Estimated Value $6,000 - 7,000.
Ex Dr Jacob Y. Terner Collection.
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