The \textit{Principia}'s second law (as Newton understood it) from Galileo to Laplace (Q2307666)

Newton considered his second law of motion as absolutely fundamental to mechanics, as indeed do we. Why then was Newton's law never cited in the main mechanics texts of the subsequent century? As stated in the \textit{Principia}, the second law reads: ``A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the line in which that force is impressed''. The author argues that this statement is imprecise, the terms are poorly-defined, and it is unclear whether it applies to both instantaneous impulses and continuous forces. Hence, it was ignored by later authors. The author rehearses the development of the fundamentals of mechanics in Galileo and Huygens, and develops a more sophisticated statement of the second law based upon Newton's manuscript sources of his reworking of the \textit{Principia} in the 1690s (not published until the Whiteside edition of Newton's papers), arguing that the second law, ``as Newton understood it'' should read something like: ``When a body in motion is acted on by a given impressed force (continuous or impulsive), the motion the body would have had if its speed and direction had been uniformly continued compounds independently with the motion the body would have had if the same given impressed force had acted on the body at rest''. The author carefully unpacks this version of the second law, showing it is a natural generalization of Huygens' second and third hypotheses in his \textit{Horologia}. Next, the author takes the reader through the major treatises on the foundations of mechanics of the 18th century, Varignon (1700), Hermann (1716), Euler (1732), MacLaurin (1742), D'Alembert (1743), Euler again (1765), Lagrange (1788), and Laplace (1799), showing in each case exactly where each author implicitly or explicitly makes a claim that is equivalent to the second law as Newton understood it. The second law is there, but hidden, and not cited.