we can never know, perhaps could never hope to appreciate, if we did know them, let us pass on, merely recalling the example of Galileo.  When the first faint glimpses of the rings of Saturn floated hazily in the field of his imperfect telescope, he was misled into the belief that three large bodies composed the then most distant light of the system,—­a conclusion which, in 1610, he communicated to Kepler in the following logograph:—­

SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEVMIBVNENGTTAVIRAVS.

It is not strange that the riddle was unread.  The old problem, Given the Greek alphabet, to find an Iliad, differs from this rather in degree than in kind.  The sentence disentangled runs thus:—­

ALTISSIMVM PLANETAM TERGEMINVM OBSERVAVI.

And yet we have never heard that Kepler, or, in fact, Leibnitz himself, felt aggrieved by such a course.

But Leibnitz made his discovery public, neglecting to give Newton any credit whatever; and so it happened that various patriotic Englishmen raised the cry of plagiarism.  Keil, in the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1708, declared that he had published the Method of Fluxions, only changing the name and notation.  Much debate and angry discussion followed; and, alas for human weakness!  Newton himself, in a later edition of the “Principia,” struck out the generous recognition of genius recorded above, and joined in terming Leibnitz an impostor, —­while the latter maintained that Newton had not fathomed the more abstruse depths of the new Calculus.  The “Commercium Epistolicum” was published, giving rise to new contentions; and only death, which ends all things, ended the dispute.  Leibnitz died in 1716.

The Calculus at first found its chief supporters on the Continent.  James and John Bernouilli, Varignon, author of the “Theory of Variations,” and the Marquis de l’Hopital, were the first to appreciate it; but soon it attracted the attention of the scientific world to such a degree that the frivolous populace of Paris had even a well-known song with the burden, “Des infiniment petits.”  Neither were opponents wanting.  Wrong-headed men and thick-headed men are unfortunately too numerous in all times and places.  One Nieuwentiit, a dweller in intellectual fogbanks, who had distinguished himself by proving the existence of the Deity in one of his works, made about this time what he doubtless considered a second discovery.  He found a flaw in the reasoning of Leibnitz, namely, that he (Nieuwentiit) could not conceive of quantities infinitely small!  A certain Chever also performed sundry singular mathematical feats, such as squaring the circle, a problem which he reduced to the single question, Construere mundum divinae menti analogum, and showing that the parabola, the only conic section squared by ancient or modern geometers, could never be quadrated, to the eternal discomfiture and discredit of the shade of Archimedes.  Leibnitz used every means in his power to engage these