ABSTRACT When Henry Macomber published his census of owners of the first edition of the Principia in 1953, he believed the edition to be small, ‘perhaps not more than 250 copies’, an estimate that still enjoys currency. Lower estimates of the size of the first edition of the Principia were based partly on assessments regarding an inhospitable market for highly technical mathematical books, and partly on the presumption that the vaunted incomprehensibility of the Principia would have militated against a sizeable edition. Our preliminary census more than doubles the number of identified copies, to 387—suggesting a much larger print run than commonly assumed – as well as encourages us to believe that there existed a wider, and competent, readership of the Principia from the start. The long-standing assumption regarding the recondite nature of Newton's science as presented in the Principia, together with claims concerning the scarcity of the book, brought many scholars to assume that Newton's masterpiece exerted little influence before the 1730s. The new empirical evidence presented in our census enables a reassessment of the early diffusion of the Principia in Europe which, in turn, would necessitate a major refinement of our understanding of the contribution of Newtonianism to Enlightenment science.

中文翻译：

---

第一版《牛顿原理》（1687 年）的初步普查

摘要 当亨利·麦康伯 (Henry Macomber) 于 1953 年发表他的第一版《原理》所有者人口普查时，他认为该版本很小，“可能不超过 250 份”，这种估计仍然很受欢迎。对《原理》第一版规模的较低估计部分是基于对高技术数学书籍的不适宜市场的评估，部分是基于这样的假设，即《原理》自吹自擂的不可理解性会妨碍大量版本。我们的初步普查使已识别的副本数量增加了一倍多，达到 387 份——这表明印刷量比通常认为的要大得多——并鼓励我们相信从一开始就存在着更广泛、更有能力的《原理》读者群。《原理》中提出的关于牛顿科学深奥性质的长期假设，以及关于该书稀缺的主张，使许多学者假设牛顿的杰作在 1730 年代之前几乎没有影响。我们人口普查中提出的新经验证据使我们能够重新评估《原理》在欧洲的早期传播，这反过来又需要我们对牛顿主义对启蒙科学的贡献的理解进行重大改进。