#HistoricalCheer Christmas Eve edition! I don't have much in the way of new personal research this year, so we're going to go with a recent Newton conundrum: what edition of Pliny's Natural History could Newton have cited? https://twitter.com/joe_saunders1/status/1342019681700474880

In one of Newton's mss, he makes citations to 3 different sections of Pliny's Natural History book 32 ch 4 (for electrum), book 34 ch 10 (for cadmia), and book 36 ch 16 (for magnesia/magnets). But he doesn't have any page numbers to narrow to an edition! https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/mss/dipl/ALCH00200/

Okay, so we won't be able to make a definitive edition choice. But maybe he owned a specific edition of the Naturalis historia? Sadly no dice, except for a 1725 translation of book 35 (see the Newton Project's transcription of Harrison's inventory http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/his-library/books-in-newtons-library)

So that means that any Latin edition pre-1727 (Newton's death) is possible. So that's only like 100s of eds., right??? *whimpers in bibliographer* But then one of my brilliant team members and I had an idea: we could bound our scope to editions owned by Trinity College Cambridge

Newton was a fellow there and the library catalog shows 14 possible eds. I looked at them all first to see if the section numbering could help narrow editions. It didn't do that, but it did show that Newton should have written l. 33, ch. 4 instead of l. 32 which is handy!

So I emailed TCC's librarians to see if they could tell me which editions were acquired pre-1727. And they could! In fact, only a 1587 Lyon ed. and a 1723 Paris ed. were acquired before 1727. And I think it's safe to eliminate the 1723 ed. bc Newton moved to London in the 1690s

All of this research and the work by the TCC librarians means that we can point to an edition that is more plausible than any of the 100s of possible eds. Definitely not certain, but plausible.

And all of this information and reasoning can be conveyed to the Chymistry users in a note next to these citations *with* acknowledgments to the assistance of the TCC librarians. Link to the ed: https://books.google.com/books?id=qapeAAAAcAAJ
See pp. 789, 813, and 867 for the sections cited by Newton