Sources & credits
Sources and credits
The Latin text, first edition (1687)
Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Londini: Jussu Societatis Regiæ ac Typis Josephi Streater, 1687). Public domain.
The Latin is taken from the volunteer transcription of the 1687 edition made by Jonathan Ingram, Keith Edkins and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (pgdp.net), released as Project Gutenberg eBook #28233 (2009): gutenberg.org/ebooks/28233. Its 1687 page numbers, its redrawn figures, and its corrections of obvious printer’s errors (shown with a dotted underline; hover to see the original reading) are kept. This site is not a Project Gutenberg edition. The text has been restructured and restyled, but not emended. The same transcription is also on Latin Wikisource: la.wikisource.org/wiki/Philosophiae_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica.
The Scholium Generale (1726 text)
The General Scholium was added in the second edition (1713). It is printed here as it stands in the third edition (1726), from the Glasgow reprint of that edition (Thomson & Blackburn, 1871), pp. 526–530, as scanned by the University of Toronto for the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/principia00newtuoft. It was transcribed by hand from two OCR passes of the same setting. Newton’s marginal notes on Pantokrator, on deus and on the ancient sources are given as footnotes a–c. In those notes, two chapter numerals that the OCR left unclear (1 Kings 8:27 and Jeremiah 23:23–24) have been read as the passages Newton plainly meant. Margin numbers in this section are the 1871 reprint’s page numbers.
Annotations
The English glosses, vocabulary notes, headnotes and commentary are original to this site, written by Ez directly from the Latin. While checking the readings, the public-domain English translation by Andrew Motte (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, London, 1729) was consulted. None of Motte’s wording is reproduced, and Motte translates the third edition, not the first. No modern copyrighted translation was used.
The preface is also given as a sentence-by-sentence translation: 31 Latin sentences, divided by hand at Newton’s own full stops, each paired with one original English sentence. The 1687 transcription reads reseratur in the sentence on geometry and magnitude, almost certainly referatur with its f misread as a long s; the Latin is left as transcribed and translated as referatur.
Type and tools
Titles are set in Fraunces, a soft old-style serif in the spirit of Windsor. Essays are set in Libre Caslon Text, the notes and translations in Source Serif 4, and the Latin in EB Garamond. The preface is served from a Cloudflare D1 database, one row per sentence. Mathematics is typeset with KaTeX at build time. The site is built with SvelteKit and served as a Cloudflare Worker.
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