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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2013
Mr President,—It has been a practice from the foundation of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to commemorate its deceased distinguished members by memoirs or biographical notices, read at the ordinary meetings of the Society. Some of these have been printed in the Transactions; and our published volumes are enriched by papers of Dugald Stewart, Professor Playfair, Sir John MacNeil, and Dr Traill, on the characters and writings of Adam Smith, Dr Hutton, Professor Robison, Sir Charles Bell, and Dr Hope. A biographical notice is now due to the memory of a distinguished countryman, late Vice-President of the Royal Society; and the following remarks will, in attempting that object, make a deviation from those more severe discussions with which the time of the Society is usually occupied, in connection either with pure mathematics, natural philosophy, or natural history.
page 498 note * Plin. Epist. iii. 5.
page 498 note † In his Lectures on the Romans, he makes no reference to an exegetical or critical view of the passages, though in that Epistle there is a great temptation to do so. He takes the statements of the Apostle in their broadest and most general acceptation. His mind did not rest on the niceties of philological distinctions.
page 499 note * This experiment, I find, had been suggested by Professor Robison, in his Elements of Mechanical Philosophy, § 474.
page 503 note * It is pleasing to remember how the last mortal days of such a man were engaged with plans of instruction for the benefit of this very class. He had for some time been entirely taken up with a School and Church, in the worst locality of the Old Town of Edinburgh. The man of high speculation became a teacher of ragged children. The Professor of Theology descended from his chair to impress the first rudiments of Christian truth upon the rude minds of a congregation the most ignorant and most neglected.
page 504 note * This principle of territorial subdivision, for which Dr Chalmers, as a Christian philanthropist, so long contended, is at last acknowledged as the essential preparation for bringing spiritual instruction to bear upon the worst portions of our crowded and demoralised population. Lord Ashley, the enlightened friend of the poor, has, with the full approbation of the Premier, moved for a commission to inquire into the best method of dividing all parishes in England which contain a population of 10,000 or upwards.
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