In telling this story of the bitter quarrel between two of the greatest men in the history of thought, the most notorious of all priority disputes, I have not attempted to enter into the technical details of the evolution of the differential and integral calculus and have tried rather to trespass as little as may be into the province of the professional historian of mathematics. My interest has been in the course of the quarrel, rather than in the technical nature of its subject, in mathematicians rather than in mathematics.

So far as I am aware, there is no earlier history of the calculus dispute of any size, though it is discussed in general histories of mathematics and in biographies of the participants, nor has there been any reissue of the Commercium Epistolicum since that edited by J–B. Biot and F. Lefort in 1856 (Paris: Mallet-Bachelier); a Spanish version of its documents was published by J. Babini in 1972 (Gotifredo Guillermo Leibniz, Isaac Newton. El cálcula infinitesimal. Origen. Polemica, Buenos Aires) and an Italian one by G. Cantelli in 1958 (La disputa Leibniz-Newton sull'analysi, Turin and Florence: P. Boringhieri). Older works such as F. Cajori's History of the Conceptions of Limits and Fluxions in Great Britain from Newton to Woodhouse (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Co., 1919) and J. M. Child's Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz (London: Open Court, 1920) are very out of date.