Mr. Archer Hirst has published a curious discovery as to
the ori- ginal of some of the passages put into Newton's mouth by the French forger whose voluminous inventions of a Pascal-Newton-Leibnitz, correspondence we mentioned last week. A certain M. Pierre Desmaizeanx, who is often mentioned in the forged correspondence, .was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society on the 3rd November, 1720, by Sir Isaac Newton, then President of the Royal Society, and shortly before his election he had presented to the Society a French translation of selections from the writings of Sir Isaac Newton, Leibnitz, Clarke, &c. Mr. Walter White, Assistant- -Secretary to the Royal Society, has discovered that some of the _Newton passages in the forged correspondence are all but ver- batim copies from passages in this book, and those not only passages which are translated from Newton, but in one case of a passage translated from Dr. Samuel Clarke's fourth' reply to Leibnitz. This passage,—one on the nature of space and time,— 'is in the forged correspondence signed with Newton's name. As it is pretty obvious, therefore, how this industrious forger has manu- factured his documents, M. Chasles will scarcely advocate the -authenticity of the correspondence any longer.
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