His work is a kind of commonplace book kept without scientific discrimination.
Sometimes, though not very often, the sections are in no proper sense essays, but merely commonplace book entries of singular facts or quotations, with hardly any comment.
Apart from the lost Handboc or Encheiridion, which seems to have been merely a commonplace-book kept by the king, the earliest work to be translated was the Dialogues of Gregory, a book enormously popular in the middle ages.
On historical subjects the most considerable are Rerum memorandarum libri, a miscellany from a student's commonplace-book, and De viris illustribus, an epitome of the biographies of Roman worthies.
Newton must have left college before August 1665, as his name does not appear in the list of those who received extra commons on that occasion, and he tells us himself in the extract from his commonplace book already quoted that he was " forced from Cambridge by the plague " in the summer of that year.
