Shortly after Isaac Newton circulated some of his theories of light in 1672, his colleague Robert Hooke claimed that most of those theories were based on Hooke' s own work. A modern reader might interpret Newton' s famous comment, if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,  as a conciliatory gesture acknowledging indebtedness to Hooke and other contemporary scientists for some of his theories. Conciliatory gestures acknowledging indebtedness were uncharacteristic of Newton, however, and in his day such allusions to giants typically referred to the ancient Greeks, not to contemporary scientists.
The statements in the passage, if true, most strongly support the idea that Newton intended to credit some contemporary scientists other than Hooke for some of the advances that Newton made in the theory of light.