navstokgap

Gregory, Astronomiae physicae et geometricae elementa, Praefatio (1702)

Companion source

Source: Internet Archive, Google Books scan bub_gb_b6WHgpAkGLMC; local OCR excerpt .txt, lines 182–472 of the archive’s _djvu.txt, retrieved 2026-09-08. Metadata: David Gregory, Astronomiae physicae et geometricae elementa (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1702), Praefatio, unpaginated, ending before “Liber primus”. The 1715 English translation, The Elements of Astronomy, Physical and Geometrical, vol. 1 (archive bim_eighteenth-century_astronomi-physic-g_gregory-david_1715_1), was inspected and its OCR was too damaged to store. Extraction: archive.org OCR of the 1702 printing; long s is read as f, italics and marginal Greek citations are garbled, but the Latin prose is followable. Rights: public domain.

Source digest

The preface argues that the physical astronomy of the book was known to the oldest philosophers: that celestial bodies gravitate mutually, are retained in their orbits by gravity, and that the law of gravity was understood, with Anaxagoras, Archelaus, Euripides and Pythagoras cited. The programmatic sentence begins “Ne cui vero Physica hic tradita, quasi novum aliquid et insolens in Astronomia videatur, eandem vetustissimis Philosophis notam … ostendam.”

For this project, this is the printed witness closest to Newton’s unpublished Classical Scholia, the target of H02 and H03. Newton supplied Gregory with material for this preface, according to the scholarship listed in the H02 seeds, which remains to be read at passage level. The preface therefore lets the historical track quote a pre-1701 printed text while the manuscript corpus stays inaccessible.

Passage anchors

Coverage and limits

Reading level passage for the programmatic paragraph on OCR text; target for verification against the scan for names and citations in the margins. The attribution of specific sentences to Newton needs the H02 scholarship.