This is the 2nd edition of Newton’s masterwork in physics.  The 1st edition is on display in Bizzell Library.

The Copernican idea that the Earth moves as a planet required a thorough revision of physics. Galileo undertook this task in his Discourse on Two New Sciences, published 95 years after Copernicus. With a mathematical description of the law of universal gravitation, Newton in this book unified the terrestrial physics of Galileo with the celestial mechanics of Kepler’s laws. The development of science from Copernicus to Newton then became recognized as a “Scientific Revolution,” a complete overthrow of Aristotelian physics and cosmology.

The second edition of Newton’s Principia contains several interesting changes from the first, intended to heighten the contrast between Newton and Descartes, including Cartesians such as Leibniz, with whom Newton had become embroiled in scientific and philosophical controversies.  Newton expunged the term “hypothesis” from his description of his own methodology in the second edition.  He retained it only to derogate physical mechanisms postulated by Descartes.  In the first sentence of the “General Scholium,” which was also new to this edition, Newton began his attack:  “The hypothesis of vortices is pressed with many difficulties.”  Another major change in the 1713 edition was the inclusion of a manifesto by its editor, Roger Cotes, the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Science at Trinity College, Cambridge.  Cotes’ preface, written 63 years after the death of Descartes and 26 years after the first edition of the Principia, defended the Newtonian methodology from charges of occultism raised by Leibniz and other continental critics, and propagandized it as conveying the best theology as well.