KEILL, John.

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An Examination of Dr. Burnet's Theory of the Earth. Together with some remarks on Mr. Whiston's New Theory of the Earth. First edition of this incisive critique of Cartesian mechanism, by a prominent Newtonian.John Keill (1671-1721), Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, was among the more controversial figures of a controversial age. He is credited with initiating the Leibniz-Newton dispute in a 1710 Philosophical Transactions article accusing Leibniz of plagiarizing Newton's technique of fluxions. At the same time, he defended Newton's primacy against the work of Bernoulli, this time going beyond even Newton's extensive appetite for controversy.In the Examination, Keill rejects the Cartesian theories of Thomas Burnet (c. 1635-1715), who advocated a hollow earth containing the waters that had formed Noah's great flood. Despite Keill's scepticism, Newton was receptive to Burnet's theories, having discussed several of them with him in the early 1680s.

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