"One thinks of the big wooden box, locked, in Isaac Newton’s rooms in Trinity College. In this box he kept alchemistic manuscripts, deistic tracts and other occ

"One thinks of the big wooden box, locked, in Isaac Newton’s rooms in Trinity College. In this box he kept alchemistic manuscripts, deistic tracts and other occult materials." Interesting thing is, most of the contents of this box was later bought by Keynes, he has a great lecture on Newton being the last magician, i.e. pre-Newtonian: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_New... What became of the box? "They remained in the box to shock profoundly any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century prying eyes. They became the possession of Catharine Barton and then of her daughter, the Countess of Portsmouth. So Newton's chest, with many hundreds of thousands of words of his unpublished writings, came to contain the 'Portsmouth Papers'. In 1888 the mathematical portion was given to the University Library at Cambridge. They have been indexed, but they have never been edited. The rest, a very large collection, were dispersed in the auction room in 1936 by Catharine Barton's descendant, the present Lord Lymington. Disturbed by this impiety, I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them, including nearly the whole of the biographical portion, that is, the 'Conduitt Papers', in order to bring them to Cambridge which I hope they will never leave. The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America, on the occasion of the recent tercentenary." For more info, see this Newton Project page: http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-papers/newton-related-papers-of-john-maynard-keynes http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/history-of-newtons-papers/...