is newton's apple apocryphal?

t is the manuscript for what would become a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton's first biographers, and published in 1752. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:
"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."
The Royal Society has made the manuscript available today for the first time in a fully interactive digital form on their website at royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages.

I decided to track down whether or not the story of Newton's apple did in fact happen. Here's what I found:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/cu...eal-story.html



So it looks like it's true.

.....What sort of fruit are best to be used, and in what proportion they are to be mixed, and what degree of ripeness they ought to have? Whether it be material to press them as soon as gathered, or to pare them? Whether there be any circumstances to be observed in pressing them? or what is the best way to do it? If you can direct us to, or procure for us a short narrative of the way of making and ordering cyder in the cyder countries, which takes in a resolution of these, or the most material of these queries, you will oblige your humble servant,

"Is. Newton."