From, Richard Westfall, "Never at Rest - A Biography of Isaac Newton"

"Let us try to place ourselves in the position of a young man in 1661, eager for knowledge, though of wholly untested capacity, as the new world of learning unrolled before his eyes. What an incredible challenge to the imagination - a world undreamed of in rural Lincolnshire, a world of many continents as extensive in their diversity as in their number. To the north lay the frigid lands of mathematics where one must breathe the bracing atmosphere of rigor. To the south lay the fetid tropical jungles of alchemy with their strange mythical fauna. Temperate lands for experimental investigation lay between. Manifestly, the very vastness of the new world placed it beyond the capacity of any one mind to grasp and to comprehend, finding an ordered cosmos where only chaos appeared. Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps some rare individual, one of the intellectual supernovae who have burst forth intermittently but most infrequently into the visible heavens of a startled world, might grapple effectively even with such a task. Other worlds new to Newton also opened themselves to his gaze in Cambridge, and his exploration of them played an important part in his life. Had he limited himself to them, however, his name would have passed long since into oblivion. As I said before, the only reason anyone writes a biography of Newton is because he chose to enter a world not only new to himself as to all undergraduates, but to man himself.

In Cambridge, Newton discovered that a new world had been discovered. He discovered as well something still more important. The early adventurers had only scouted its coasts. Vast continents remained to be explored....