Revised 2007Revised 2007Revised 2007

Junior Natural Science

© 2007

The goal of this manual is to aid in students’ productive reading and understanding of the texts in Junior Natural Science, especially Newton’s Principia. This manual was composed by a group of Thomas Aquinas College tutors during the summer of 2004, and was again slightly revised during the summers of 2005-2007. Those tutors included: Mark Berquist, Sean Collins, Chris Decaen, Richard Ferrier, Ron Richard, Andrew Seeley, Larry Shields, and Ed Wassell. We drew heavily from hand-outs we and other tutors had composed over the years and from Robert Bart’s “Notes to Accompany the Reading of Newton’s Principia Mathematica,” 2nd ed. (1968). Note Bene: Although some parts of this manual are formally part of the curriculum (for example, the selections from Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy), overall the use of the individual parts of this manual is left to the tutor’s discretion.