Isaac Newton's Advice

Since in your letter you give mee so much liberty of spending my judgment about what may be to your advantage in travelling, I shall do it more freely than perhaps otherwise would have been decent. First then, I will lay down some general rules, most of which, I believe, you have considered already; but, if any of them be new to you, they may excuse the rest; if none at all, yet is my punishment more in writing than yours in reading. 'When you come to any fresh company--1. Observe their humours. 2. Suit your own carriage thereto, by which insinuation you will make their converse more free and open. 3. Let your discourse be more in querys and doubtings than peremptory assertions or disputings, it being the designe of travellers to learn, not to teach. Besides, it will persuade your acquaintance that you have the greater esteem of them, and soe make them more ready to communicate what they know to you; whereas, nothing sooner occasions disrespect and quarrels than peremptorinesse. You will find little or no advantage in seeming wiser, or much more ignorant, than your company. 4. Seldom discommend anything, though never so bad, or do it but moderately, lest you bee unexpectedly forced to an unhansome retraction. It is safer to commend anything more than it deserves; for commendations meet not soe often with oppositions, or at least, are not usually so ill-resented by men that think otherwise, as discommendations; and you will insinuate into men's favour by nothing sooner than seeming to approve and commend what they like; but beware of doing it by a comparison. 5. If you be affronted, it is better, in a forraine country, to pass it by in silence, and with a jest, though with some dishonour, than to endeavour revenge; for, in the first case, your credit's ne'er the worse when you return to England, or come into other company that have not heard of the quarrel. But, in the second case, you may beare the mearks of the quarrel while you live, if you out-live it at all. But, if you find yourself unavoidably engaged, 'tis best, I think, if you can command your passion and language, to keep them pretty eavenly at some certain moderate pitch, not much hightning them to exasperate your adversary or provoke his friends, nor letting them grow over much dejected to make him insult. In a word, if you can keep reason above passion, that and watchfulnesse will be your best defendants. To which purpose you may consider that, though such excuses as this--He provok't mee so much I could not forbear--may pass among friends, yet amongst strangers they are insignificant, and only argue a traveller's weaknesse. To these I may add some general heads for inquiries or observations, such as at present I can think on. As--1. To observe the policys, wealth, and state affairs of nations, so far as a solitary traveller may conveniently doe. Their impositions upon all sorts of people, trades, or commoditys, that are remarkable. 3. Their laws and customs; how far they differ from ours. 4. Their trades and arts; wherein they excel or come short of us in England. 5. Such fortifications as you shall meet with; their fashion, strength, and advantages for defence, and other such military affairs as are considerable. 6. The power and respect belonging to their degrees of nobility or magistracy. 7. It will not be time mispent to make a catalogue of the names of excellencys of those men that are most wise, learned, or esteemed in any nation. 8. Observe the mechanisme and manner of guiding ships. 9. Observe the products of nature in several places, especiallin in mines, with the circumstances of mining, and of extracting metals or minerals out of their oare, and of refining them; and if you meet with any transmutations out of their own species into another, as out of iron into copper, out of any metal into quicksilver, out of one salt into another, or into an insipid body, etc., those above all will be worth your noting, being the most luciferous, and many times luciferous experiments too in philosophy. 10. The prices of diets and other things. 11. And the staple commoditys of places.

These generals, such as at present I could think of, if they will serve for nothing else, yet they may assist you in drawing up a model to regulate your travels by . . . You may inform yourself whether the Dutch have nay tricks to keep their ships from being all worm-eaten in their voyages to the Indies. Whether pendulum clocks do any service in finding out the longitude. etc. I am very weary, and shall not stay to part with a long compliment, only I wish you a good journey, and God be with you.

Trinity College, Cambridge
May 18, 1669

--from The Practical Cogitator: The Thinker's Anthology ed. Charles P. Curtis, Jr. and Ferris Greenslet, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945.

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