is inclined to be impetuous, to rush in, as the saying goes, where angels fear to tread. But better men than yourself have come to realise that the brashness of youth is no substitute for the wisdom of maturity.

As to your other remarks, you know perfectly well what I meant when I said that no good can come out of a wine barrel. To accuse me of sacrilege and blasphemy is ridiculous. You are twisting my words.

Please let us have no more of this name-calling, and get down to more important work.

Sincerely, Isaac Barrow

12 January 1667 London

Dear Mr. Newton:

Thank you again for your rapid work in tabulating our results. It is most gratifying to find a young man with such zeal for his work.

As I have said before, I am no mathematician, but I must confess that your explanation makes very little more sense to me than your original mathematical formulae.

As I understand it, you are proposing a set of equations which will show the range of any weapon by computing the weight of the ball against the weight of the powder. (Perhaps I err here, but that is my understanding.) It seems to me that you are building a castle-in-Spain on rather insubstantial ground. Where is your data? What research have you done on cannon-fire? Without a considerable body of facts to work with, such broad generalisations as you propose are quite out of order.

Even if such a thing could be done—which, pardon me, I take the liberty to doubt—I fear it would be impractical. I realise that you know nothing of military problems, so I must point out to you that our cannoneers are enlisted men—untutored, rough soldiers, not educated gentlemen. Many of them cannot read, much less compute abstruse geometrical formulae. It will be difficult enough to teach them to use the range tables when we complete them.

Indeed, I may say that this last point is one of the many stumbling-blocks in the path of our project. More than one of the staff at the War Office has considered it to be insurmountable, and many times I have fought for the continuance of the research in the face of great opposition.

I greatly fear that using any but methods known to be practicable would result in our appropriation being cut off in Parliament.

Again, however, I 

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