The earliest copy in Russia of Newton’s Principia

Some years ago an exhibition of rare books was held to mark the recent opening of the renovated assembly hall of Moscow University. One of the exhibits was a contemporary edition of Newton’s Principia, and examination revealed that it was a first edition of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, published in London in 1687. A historian of science must find this a striking fact, given the current opinion that, until the October Revolution at least, Russia had not possessed a copy of the first edition.1 A copy was donated as a great treasure by the Royal Society of London to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1943, on the occasion of the tercentenary of Isaac Newton’s birth." Further investigations revealed the more striking fact that this copy of the Principia reached Russia in the time of Newton: it was bought by Robert Erskine, chief physician to Peter the Great in 1718, among other books from the library of Archibald Pitcairn. Pitcairn’s library together with some private collections formed the nucleus of the St Petersburg Academy Library. Almost 100 years later, in 1814, a part of the academical collection, including the copy of the first edition of the Principia, was transferred to Moscow University, in whose library it remains up to this day. See figures 1 and 2. The conjecture that a copy of the first edition of the Principia might have existed in Russia in Peter the Great’s time has been made before, mainly because Peter the Great had visited England in 1697/98 (the so-called ‘Great Embassy’), and many Englishmen versed in mathematics and physics had joined the Tsar’s service

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