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motto: Take Physic, Physic!' On this occasion he appears to join in the "hue and cry raised against incompetent possessors of diplomas," and affects no little superiority over the M. D.'s of the Scottish metropolis. He seems to think that the usual period of three years, required for a degree in Scotland, is by far too short, and wishes therefore to extend it to five or six. He proceeds to inquire whether it is meant to tolerate "the existing irregular practitioners, and advertising quacks ?" and "whether the present race of regulars deserve to have an unrestrained monopoly of the sick trade, secured to them by law?" "What,” adds he, "could invalids lose by the suppression of all quack medicines for consumption, while the regular faculty is in snug possession of the hot-well here by the side of the Avon? What is there in Godbold's vegetable balsam, that this water cannot replace? and (faith in the gift of St Vincent failing) have we not the air of Clifton close at hand, offering itself to us as presumptive heir to the reputation of the water? Should you allow the said water and the said air to be abundantly calculated to satisfy any craving of credulity; consider a little, I beseech you, the accommodation of that part of the faculty which is engaged in the great corresponding branch of medical practice. This cannot be said to be carried on by corresponding societies; the term is too large; knots of two or three only are concerned in this correspondThese brother doctors, Sir, though separated as widely as I am. from you at this moment, or more so, sympathize as tenderly, and are as ready to relieve one another's distresses, as those knights of old, of whom we hear as brothers in arms. Take for instance a common case: the family doctor in London, Dublin, or where you please, cannot bear to think that the son or daughter of a dear friend of his should die at home, just under his nose. So no sooner does it come to a hot-well case (a term within a few weeks synonymous to a corpse) than off the invalid is sent with a pass. Invalid and pass are delivered to the receiv ing doctor, whose feelings, as he is a stranger, cannot be so much overpowered by the tenderness of friendship. And when the patient is dead and disposed off, the receiving party, you know, may never be again distressed by the sight of any of the family. He prescribes, therefore, a way his friend had done before him, adding, of course, so much per day of the said hot-well water, which, I repeat it, may be considered as a worthy substitute for any quack composition ever put together. So it goes on, until the jaws of the patient are either locked with death or despair."

ence.

His death occurred on the 24th of December, 1809. On a post mortem examination, it was clearly discernible that the machinery had been worn out, and that the animal functions were necessarily suspended, from the progress of the disease. The left lobe of the lungs was found to be in a morbid state, and a lodgement of water had also been effected. "Thus died," says one of his biographers, "after he had attained the forty-ninth year of his life, Thomas Beddoes, a man who possessed a warmth, a zeal, an ardour for the pursuit of medical science, which had seldom been equalled by any, and was assuredly excelled by none. His whole life was devoted to experiment, to inquiry, to correspondence with men of talents, and to instruction of himself and others. He possessed a fine genius for poetry, and had the happy faculty of viewing every subject on its most brilliant side. His language was glowing, figur

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ative, and sometimes even sublime. He despised quackery, and tensions of every kind; and was accustomed to detect and expose these to the full as freely in his own as in other professions. In all the social relations of life his conduct uniformly bore testimony to the excellence of his heart; for he was a good friend, a good father, and a good husband."

The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal' thus concludes a summary of his character: "The reputation of Dr Beddoes as a physician has not yet attained so high a rank as it deserves. There is an ardour of talent, an animating earnestness, a stimulant exaggeration in his writings, well adapted to arouse the torpor, and to provoke the attention of medical readers. He had the mind of a poet and a painter, and displayed the powers of his imagination in vivid representations of facts and theories. He was a pioneer in the road to discovery. Those high views, and that habitual appeal to the classical minds of philosophers which he uniformly displayed, have not obtained such sanction as they ought; his zeal has been mistaken for presumption, but perhaps some future age will affix to it the juster character of energy and truth. He was a man of great learning, and understood perfectly the Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German languages. His temper was admirable, and he was highly respectable in all the relations of private life."

Henry Cavendish.

BORN A. D. 1731.-DIED A.D. 1810.

THE honourable Henry Cavendish, son of Lord Charles Cavendish, was born at Nice in Piedmont. He was privately educated, but completed his studies at Cambridge. He early gave indications of a powerful and acute mind, which directed itself chiefly to the physical sciences. He studied and rendered himself familiarly conversant with every part of Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy; the principles of which he applied to an investigation of the laws on which the phenomena of electricity depend. Pursuing the same science, on the occasion of Mr Walsh's experiments with the torpedo, he gave a satisfactory explanation of the remarkable powers of electrical fishes,-pointing out that distinction between common and animal electricity which has since been amply confirmed by the brilliant discoveries in Galvanism. He wrote two papers on this subject, respectively entitled 'An Attempt to explain some of the Principal Phenomena of Electricity, by means of an Elastic Fluid,' and 'An Account of a Set of Experiments to determine the Nature of the Shock communicated by the Torpedo.' Having turned his attention very early to pneumatic chemistry, he ascer tained in 1766 the extreme levity of inflammable air, now called hydrogen gas. In the same path of science he made the important discovery of the composition of water by the union of two gases; and thus laid the foundation of the modern system of chemistry, which rests principally on this fact, and that of the decomposition of water, announced soon after-though certainly not discovered-by M. Lavoisier. As the purity of atmospherical air had been a subject of controversy,

Mr Cavendish contrived essential improvements in the method of performing experiments with an eudiometer; by means of which he was the first person who showed that the proportion of pure air in the atmosphere is nearly the same in all open places. The other and much larger portion of our atmosphere, he sagaciously conjectured to be the basis of the acid of nitre; an opinion that he soon brought to the test, by an ingenious and laborious experiment which completely proved its truth; whence this gas has now generally obtained the name of nitrogen.

So many and such great discoveries spread his fame throughout Europe, and he was universally considered as one of the first inductive philosophers of the age. Among the labours of his latter days, is the nice and difficult experiment by which he determined the mean density of the earth; an element of consequence in delicate calculations of astronomy, as well as in geological inquiries. Even in the last years of his life, at the advanced age of 77, he proposed and described improvements in the manner of dividing largo astronomical instruments. These pursuits, together with reading of various kinds, by which he acquired a deep insight into almost every topic of general knowledge, formed the whole occupation of his life, and were in fact his sole amusement. From his attachment to such occupations, and the constant resource he found in them, together with a shyness and diffidence natural to his disposition, his habits had from early life been secluded. He possessed great affluence, which was to him rather matter of embarrassment than of gratification; but however careless about its improvement, he was regular in its management and direction.

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"The fundamentality, if we may use such a word, of his chemical results," says a writer in the Penny Cyclopedia,' "has not been surpassed by those of any other discoverer in chemistry. But he deserves fame for the great accuracy of his experiments, and the (then) unequalled soundness of his views. One writer asserts that every sentence he has written will bear microscopic examination. A French writer admits (we should say affirms) that he furnished Lavoisier with the materials of his system; and Sir Humphry Davy, in a lecture delivered shortly after the death of Cavendish, speaks as follows: His processes were all of a finished nature, perfected by the hand of a master; they required no correction; and though many of them were performed in the very infancy of chemical science, yet their accuracy and their beauty have remained unimpaired amidst the progress of discovery.' The discoveries of Cavendish were finished; he formed his substances both by analysis and synthesis; ascertained that the weight of his product was the sum of that of its components, and determined its specific gravity. He was the first who carried the mind and methods of a mathematician into the field from which the alchemist had not long retired, and in which the speculator still remained. And when we say the mind and methods of a mathematician, we do not deny that the inductive philosopher had already been there; but it was to remark phenomena, and not to measure quantities."

Nevil Maskelyne.

BORN A. D. 1732.-died a. D. 1811.

DR MASKELYNE was the son of Edmund Maskelyne, Esq., of Burton, in Wiltshire. He was born in London, we believe, about the year 1732, and finished his education at Trinity college, Cambridge; of which, being bred to the church, he afterwards became a fellow Having obtained a curacy, he removed to London in 1755.

In the autumn of 1760, being distinguished for his mathematical attainments, he was appointed by the Royal society to go to the island of St Helena, in order to observe the transit of Venus over the sun, on the 6th of June, 1761. His observations (which were not, indeed, so complete as he wished, on account of the weather being very cloudy) were published in the Fhilosophical transactions' for the year 1761.

In the spring of 1763, Mr Maskelyne published his British Mariner's Guide,' 4to, a very useful practical work. On the 9th of June following, Mr Maskelyne, at a meeting of the Royal society, moved, and it was unanimously agreed to, that their council, as visitors of the Royal observatory at Greenwich, should take proper measures for obtaining and securing the astronomical observations that had been made there in time past, for the benefit of the public. In September of the same year the lords of the admiralty appointed Mr Maskelyne chaplain of his majesty's ship Louisa, Admiral Tyrrel. In this capacity he went out, accompanied by Mr Charles Green, to Barbadoes; and by appointment of the Board of Longitude, fixed the longitude of that island by astronomical observations, for the trial of Mr Harrison's marine time-keeper. In the course of the voyage he was to observe the distances of the moon from the sun and fixed stars, with Hadley's sextant; and to make observations of eclipses of Jupiter's satellites, and occultations of stars by the moon, in Mr Irwin's marine chair, for the trial of those two other methods of finding the longitude at sea. On the 26th of February 1765, his appointment as Astronomer Royal was announced in the London Gazette. This appointment included a seat at the Board of Longitude. Soon after his accession to this office, he laid before the Board of Longitude a plan for an annual 'Nautical Almanack and Astronomical Ephemeris.' The first of these valuable pamphlets was published in 1767.

In 1767 Mr Maskelyne published, by order of the Commissioners of Longitude,' An Account of the Going of Mr John Harrison's Watch at the Royal Observatory, from May 6th, 1766, to March 4th, 1767,' &c.; which gave rise to a controversy between him and the inventor. The general opinion delivered by Mr Maskelyne, concerning Mr Harrison's watch, was in the following words: "That Mr Harrison's watch cannot be depended upon to keep the longitude within a degree in a West India voyage of six weeks; nor to keep the longitude within half a degree for more than a fortnight; and then it must be kept in a place where the thermometer is always some degrees above freezing: that in case the cold amounts to freezing, the watch cannot be depended upon to keep the longitude within half a degree for more than a few

days; and perhaps not so long, if the cold be intense: nevertheless, that it is a useful and valuable invention; and, in conjunction with the observations of the distance of the moon from the sun and fixed stars, may be of considerable advantage to navigation." Mr Harrison, however, declared that he was not satisfied with the facts reported by Mr Maskelyne concerning his watch, for several reasons, and principally, because he knew him to be deeply interested in the Lunar Tables,'a scheme which had been set up some years ago in competition with the time-piece.

In 1774 were published his Tables for computing the apparent Places of the fixed Stars, and reducing Observations of the Planets,' folio. About two years after this, by his majesty's command, Mr Maskelyne produced the first volume of Astronomical Observations made at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for the year 1765.' These have been annually continued to the year 1803. During the years 1774, 1775, and 1776, Mr Maskelyne was engaged in endeavouring to determine the mean density of the earth. An unsatisfactory experiment had been previously made by Bouguier, who, in attempting to determine the attraction of mountains from the manner in which the plumb-line of the astronomical sector was affected, found only half the quantity it should have been from the size of the mountain, which he, therefore, concluded to be hollow. Dr Maskelyne chose, for the place of his observation, the mountain of Schehallien; and employed in his observations the sector he had used at St Helena, after having corrected the suspension and changed the divisions.

We do not know the date of Mr Maskelyne's doctor's degree; but find him presented, as D. D., to the living of North Runcton, in the county of Norfolk, about February, 1782. In 1792 Dr Maskelyne published Michael Taylor's Tables of Logarithms,'-a most astonishing evidence of painful industry. Mr Taylor had been greatly encouraged by the doctor in executing this work; and having died when not half-a-dozen pages of it remained unfinished, Dr Maskelyne brought it to a conclusion, and prefixed to it a very masterly introduction.

The contributions of this gentleman to the transactions of the Royal society are not more remarkable for number than for importance. His merits, as an astronomer, have been summed up by Delambre, who observes, that Maskelyne left the most complete set of observations ever given to the world; "and if, by any great revolution," he adds, "the works of all other astronomers should be lost, and this collection preserved, it would contain sufficient materials to raise again, nearly entire, the edifice of modern astronomy."

Richard Cumberland.

BORN A. D. 1731.-DIED A. D. 1811.

"ON the 19th day of February, 1732," says Mr Cumberland in his autobiography, "I was born in the Master's Lodge of Trinity college, inter silvas Academi, under the roof of my grandfather Bentley, in what is called the Judge's Chamber." When turned of six years of age, we find that he was sent to the school at Fury St Edmund's, then under