those De Resolutione æquationum affectarum, of which there is an almost complete copy. This part was evidently new to him. If he examined Newton's entire tract, the other parts did not particularly impress him. From it he seems to have gained nothing pertaining to the infinitesimal calculus. By the previous introduction
of his own algorithm he had made greater progress than by what came to his knowledge in London. Nothing mathematical that he had received engaged his thoughts in the immediate future, for on his way back to Holland he composed a lengthy dialogue on mechanical subjects.
Duillier's insinuations lighted up a flame of discord which a whole century was hardly sufficient to extinguish. Leibniz, who had never contested the priority of Newton's discovery, and who appeared to be quite satisfied with Newton's admission in his scholium, now appears for the first time in the controversy. He made an animated reply in the Leipzig Acts, and complained to the Royal Society of the injustice done him.
Here the affair rested for some time. In the Quadrature of Curves, published 1704, for the first time, a formal exposition of the method and notation of fluxions was made public. In 1705 appeared an unfavourable review of this in the Leipzig Acts, stating that Newton uses and always has used fluxions for the differences of Leibniz. This was considered by Newton's friends an imputation of plagiarism on the part of their chief, but this interpretation was always strenuously resisted by Leibniz. Keill, professor of astronomy at Oxford, undertook
with more zeal than judgment the defence of Newton. In a paper inserted in the Philosophical Transactions of 1708, he claimed that Newton was the first inventor of fluxions and "that the same calculus was afterward published by Leibniz, the name and the mode of notation being changed." Leibniz complained to the secretary of the Royal Society of bad treatment and requested the interference of that body to induce Keill to disavow the intention of imputing fraud. Keill was not made to retract his accusation; on the contrary, was authorised by Newton and the Royal Society to explain and defend his statement. This he did in a long letter. Leibniz thereupon complained that the charge was now more open than
before, and appealed for justice to the Royal Society and to Newton himself. The Royal Society, thus appealed to as a judge, appointed a committee which collected and reported upon a large mass of documents–-mostly letters from and to Newton, Leibniz, Wallis, Collins, etc. This report, called the
Commercium Epistolicum, appeared in the year 1712 and again
in 1725, with a Recensio prefixed, and additional notes by Keill.
The final conclusion in the Commercium Epistolicum was that Newton was the first inventor. But this was not to the point. The question was not whether Newton was the first inventor, but whether Leibniz had stolen the method. The committee had not formally ventured to assert their belief that Leibniz was a plagiarist. Yet there runs throughout the document a desire of proving Leibniz guilty of more than they meant positively to affirm. Leibniz protested only in private letters against the proceeding of the Royal Society, declaring that he would not answer an argument so weak. John Bernoulli, in a letter to Leibniz, which was published
later in an anonymous tract, is as decidedly unfair towards Newton as the friends of the latter had been towards Leibniz. Keill replied, and then Newton and Leibniz appear as mutual accusers in several letters