Isaac Newton’s private papers, inherited first by his niece Catherine Barton, then passed to the Earl of Portsmouth, then examined in 1777 by Bishop Samuel Horsley, and finally donated to Cambridge University, have now been catalogued. It turns out that a large body of work, approximately one million words, is devoted to alchemy and theology! Newton, in fact, devoted a good portion of his life to alchemy rather than physics and science. This portion of the material was deemed of little interest and returned to the Earls of Portsmouth.
