| Description | Scurrilous verses by the Victorian flat-Earther, putting the case that Isaac Newton was drunk, rather than inspired, during the famous apple-tree incident.
Concluding with prose: 'It is believed [by Hampden] that Sir Isaac Newton got his idea of "Gravitation" from seeing an apple fall from a tree. Surely any man must have been in liquor or insane who invented such preposterous theories as Rotundity and Revolution, Gravitation, and Attraction, from the fall of an apple, and there and then applied such conflicting principles to the Universe which the Almighty had created without having recourse to any such monstrous absurdities'.
John Hampden was a protaganist in the Bedford Level Experiment, with Alfred Russel Wallace. |