Part 15

His fate has been a mournful and a strange one, but he knew it, and encountered it with a full knowledge of what it entailed. He perilled everything on his theory; and if this hypothesis--it may be somewhat prematurely uttered to the world, and the full working out of which, by rigid scientific realization, was denied him by years of intense and incapacitating suffering, ending only in death, but the "relevancy" of which, to use the happy expression of Dr. Chalmers, we hold him to have proved, and in giving a glimpse of which, he showed, we firmly believe, what has been called that "instinctive grasp which the healthy imagination takes of possible truth,"--if his theory of the unity of matter, and the consequent transmutability of the now called elementary bodies, were substantiated in the lower but essential platform of actual experiment, this, along with his original doctrine of atoms and their forces, would change the entire face of chemistry, and make a Cosmos where now there is endless agglomeration and confusion,--would, in a word, do for the science of the molecular constitution of matter and its laws of action and reaction at insensible distances, what Newton's doctrine of gravitation has done for the celestial dynamics. For, let it be remembered, that the highest speculation and proof in this department--by such men as Dumas, Faraday, and William Thomson, and others--points in this direction; it does no more as yet perhaps than point, but some of us may live to see "_resurgam_" inscribed over Samuel Brown's untimely grave, and applied with gratitude and honour to him whose eyes closed in darkness on the one great object of his life, and the hopes of whose "unaccomplished years" lie buried with him.

Very different from either, though worthy of and capable of relishing much that was greatest and best in both, was he whom we all loved and mourn, and who, this day week,* was carried by such a multitude of mourners to that grave, which to his eye had been open and ready for years.

* Monday, 28th November 1859.

George Wilson was born in Edinburgh in 1818. His father, Mr. Archibald Wilson, was a wine merchant, and died sixteen years ago; his mother, Janet Aitken, still lives to mourn and to remember him, and she will agree with us that it is sweeter to remember him than to have converse with the rest. Any one who has had the privilege to know him, and to enjoy his bright and rich and beautiful mind, will not need to go far to learn where it was that her son George got all of that genius and worth and delightfulness which is transmissible. She verifies what is so often ànd so truly said of the mothers of remarkable men. She was his first and best _Alma Mater_, and in many senses his last, for her influence over him continued through life. George had a twin brother, who died in early life; and we cannot help referring to his being one of twins, something of that wonderful faculty of attracting and being personally loved by those about him, which was one of his strongest as it was one of his most winning powers. He was always fond of books, and of fun, the play of the mind. He left the High School at fifteen and took to medicine; but he soon singled out chemistry, and, under the late Kenneth Kemp, and our own distinguished Professor of _Materia Medica_, himself a first-class chemist, he acquired such knowledge as to become assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Graham, then Professor of Chemistry in University College, and now Master of the Mint. So he came out of a thorough and good school, and had the best of masters.

He then took the degree of M.D., and became a Lecturer on Chemistry, in what is now called the extra-academical school of medicine, but which in our day was satisfied with the title of private lecturers. He became at once a great favourite, and, had his health and strength enabled him, he would have been long a most successful and popular teacher; but general feeble health, and a disease in the ankle-joint requiring partial amputation of the foot, and recurrent attacks of a serious kind in his lungs, made his life of public teaching one long and sad trial. How nobly, how sweetly, how cheerily he bore all these long baffling years; how his bright, active, ardent, unsparing soul lorded it over his frail but willing body, making it do more than seemed possible, and as it were by sheer force of will ordering it to live longer than was in it to do, those who lived with him and witnessed this triumph of spirit over matter, will not soon forget. It was a lesson to every one of what true goodness of nature, elevated and cheered by the highest and happiest of all motives, can make a man endure, achieve, and enjoy.

As is well known, Dr. Wilson was appointed in 1855 to the newly-constituted Professorship of Technology, and to the Curatorship of the Industrial Museum. The expenditure of thought, of ingenuity, of research and management--the expenditure, in a word, of himself--involved in originating and giving form and purpose to a scheme so new and so undefined, and, in our view, so undefinable, must, we fear, have shortened his life, and withdrawn his precious and quite singular powers of illustrating and adorning, and, in the highest sense, sanctifying and blessing science, from this which seemed always to us his proper sphere. Indeed, in the opinion of some good judges, the institution of such a chair at all, and especially in connexion with a University such as ours, and the attaching to it the conduct of a great Museum of the Industrial Arts, was somewhat hastily gone into, and might have with advantage waited for and obtained a little more consideration and forethought. Be this as it may, Dr. Wilson did his duty with his whole heart and soul--making a class, which was always increasing, and which was at its largest at his death.

We have left ourselves no space to speak of Dr. Wilson as an author, as an academic and popular lecturer, as a member of learned societies, as a man of exquisite literary powers and fancy, and as a citizen of remarkable public acceptation. This must come from some more careful, and fuller, and more leisurely record of his genius and worth. What he was as a friend it is not for us to say; we only know that when we leave this world we would desire no better memorial than to be remembered by many as George Wilson now is, and always will be. His _Life of Cavendish_ is admirable as a biography, full of life, of picturesque touches, and of realization of the man and of his times, and is, moreover, thoroughly scientific, containing, among other discussions, by far the best account of the great water controversy from the Cavendish point of view. His _Life of John Reid_ is a vivid and memorable presentation to the world of the true lineaments, manner of life, and inmost thought and heroic sufferings, as well as of the noble scientific achievements of that strong, truthful, courageous, and altogether admirable man, and true discoverer--a genuine follower of John Hunter.

_The Five Gateways of Knowledge_ is a prose poem, a hymn of the finest utterance and fancy--the white light of science diffracted through the crystalline prism of his mind into the coloured glories of the spectrum; truth dressed in the iridescent hues of the rainbow, and not the less but all the more true. His other papers in the British Quarterly, the North British Review, and his last gem on "Paper, Pens, and Ink," in his valued and generous friend Macmillan's first number of his Magazine, are all astonishing proofs of the brightness, accuracy, vivacity, unweariedness of his mind, and the endless sympathy and affectionate play of his affections with the full round of scientific truth. His essay on "Colour Blindness" is, we believe, as perfect a monogram as exists, and will remain likely untouched and unadded to, factum ad unguem. As may be seen from these remarks, we regard him not so much as, like Edward Forbes, a great observer and quiet generalizer, or, like Samuel Brown, a discoverer and philosopher properly so called--though, as we have said, he had enough of these two men's prime qualities to understand and relish and admire them. His great quality lay in making men love ascertained and recorded truth, scientific truth especially; he made his reader and hearer enjoy facts. He illuminated the Book of Nature as they did the missals of old. His nature was so thoroughly composite, so in full harmony with itself, that no one faculty could or cared to act without calling in all the others to join in full chorus. To take an illustration from his own science, his faculties interpenetrated and interfused themselves into each other, as the gases do, by a law of their nature. Thus it was that everybody understood and liked and was impressed by him; he touched them at every point. Knowledge was to him no barren, cold essence: it was alive and flushed with the colours of the earth and sky, and all over with light and stars. His flowers--and his mind was full of flowers--were from seeds, and were sown by himself. They were neither taken from other gardens and stuck in rootless, as children do, much less were they of the nature of gumfiowers, made with hands, wretched and dry and scentless.

Truth of science was to him a body, full of loveliness, perfection, and strength, in which dwelt the unspeakable Eternal. This, which was the dominant idea of his mind--the goodliness, and not less the godliness of all science--made his whole life, his every action, every letter he wrote, every lecture he delivered, his last expiring breath, instinct with the one constant idea that all truth, all goodness, all science, all beauty, all gladness, are but the expression of the mind and will and heart of the Great Supreme. And this, in his case, was not mysticism, neither was it merely a belief in revealed religion, though no man cherished and believed in his Bible more firmly and cordially than he; it was the assured belief, on purely scientific grounds, that God is indeed and in very truth all in all; that, to use the sublime adaptation by poor crazy Smart, the whole creation, visible and invisible, spiritual and material, everything that has being, is--to those who have ears to hear--for ever declaring "Thou Art," before the throne of the Great I AM.

To George Wilson, to all such men--and this is the great lesson of his life--the heavens are for ever telling His glory, the firmanent is for ever showing forth His handiwork; day unto day, every day, is for ever uttering speech, and night unto night is showing knowledge concerning Him. When he considered these heavens, as he lay awake, weary, and in pain, they were to him the work of His fingers. The moon, walking in brightness, and lying in white glory on his bed--the stars--were by Him ordained. He was a singularly happy, and happy-making- man. No one since his boyhood could have suffered more from pain, and languor, and the misery of an unable body. Yet he was not only cheerful, he was gay, full of all sorts of fun--genuine fun--and his jokes and queer turns of thought and word were often worthy of Cowper or Charles Lamb. We wish we had them collected. Being, from his state of health and his knowledge in medicine, necessarily "mindful of death," having the possibility of his dying any day or any hour, always before him, and that "undiscovered country," lying full in his view, he must, taking, as he did, the right notion of the nature of things--have had a peculiar intensity of pleasure in the every-day beauties of the world.

"The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him were opening Paradise."

They were to him all the more exquisite, all the more altogether lovely, these Pentlands and the Braid Hills, and all his accustomed drives and places; these rural solitudes and pleasant villages and farms, and the countenances of his friends, and the clear, pure, radiant face of science and of nature, were to him all the more to be desired and blessed and thankful for, that he knew the pallid king at any time might give that not unexpected knock, and summon him away.

$NOTES ON ART.

"_The use of this feigned history" (the Ideal Arts of Poesy, Painting, Music, &c.) "hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the MIND OF MAN IN THESE POINTS WHEREIN THE NATURE OF THINGS DOTH deny IT, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. So it appeareth that Poesy' (and the others) "srrveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews ofthings to the desires of the mind; whereas reason" {science,philosophy) "doth buckle and bozv the mind to the nature of things.'"--Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning.

"To look on noble forms

Makes noble through the sensuous organism

That which is higher."--The Princess.

"The statue" of the Duke Lorenzo by Michael Angelo "is larger than life, but not so large as to shock belief. It is the most real and unreal thing that ever came from the chisel."--Note in Rogers's "Italy." These two words, 11 real and unreal," comprehend the philosophy ofart; which proposes to itself the idealizing of the real, and the realizing of the ideal._

|One evening in the spring of 1846, as my wife and I were sitting at tea, _Parvula_ in bed, and the Sputchard reposing, as was her wont, with her rugged little brown forepaws over the edge of the fender, her eyes shut, toasting, and all but roasting herself at the fire,--a note was brought in, which, from its fat, soft look, by a hopeful and not unskilled palpitation I diagnosed as that form of lucre which in Scotland may well be called filthy.

I gave it across to Madam, who, opening it, discovered four five-pound notes, and a letter addressed to me. She gave it me. It was from Hugh Miller, editor of the _Witness_ newspaper, asking me to give him a notice of the

Exhibition of the Scottish Academy then open, in words I now forget, but which were those of a thorough gentleman, and enclosing the aforesaid fee. I can still remember, or indeed feel the kind of shiver, half of fear and pleasure, on encountering this temptation; but I soon said, "You know I can't take this; I can't write; I never wrote a word for the press." She, with "wifelike government," kept the money, and heartened me to write, and write I did, but with awful sufferings and difficulty, and much destruction of sleep. I think the only person who suffered still more must have been the compositor. Had this packet not come in, and come in when it did, and had the Sine Quâ Non not been retentive and peremptory, there are many chances to one I might never have plagued any printer with my bad hand and my endless corrections, and my general incoherency as to proofs, _teste Jacobo Grey_.

I tell this small story, partly for my own pleasure, and as a tribute to that remarkable man, who stands alongside of Burns and Scott, Chalmers and Carlyle, the foremost Scotsmen of their time--a rough, almost rugged nature, shaggy with strength, clad with zeal as with a cloak, in some things sensitive and shamefaced as a girl; moody and self-involved, but never selfish; full of courage, and of keen insight into nature and men, and the principles of both, but simple as a child in the ways of the world; self-taught and self-directed, argumentative and scientific, as few men of culture have ever been, and yet with more imagination than either logic or knowledge; to the last as shy and _blate_ as when working in the quarries at Cromarty. In his life a noble example of what our breed can produce, of what energy, honesty, intensity, and genius can achieve; and in his death a terrible example of that revenge which the body takes upon the soul when brought to bay by its inexorable taskmaster. I need say no more. His story is more tragic than any tragedy. Would to God it may warn those who come after to be wise in time, to take the same--I ask no more--care of their body, which is their servant, their beast of burden, as they would of their horse.

Few men are endowed with such a brain as Hugh Miller--huge, active, concentrated, keen to fierceness; and therefore few men need fear, even if they misuse and overtask theirs as he did, that it will turn, as it did with him, and rend its master. But a§ assuredly as there is a certain weight which a bar of iron will bear and no more, so is there a certain weight of work which the organ by which we act, by which we think, and feel, and will--cannot sustain, blazing up into brief and ruinous madness, or sinking into idiocy. At the time he wrote to me, Mr. Miller and I were strangers, and I don't think I ever spoke to him; but his manner of doing the above act made me feel, that in that formidable and unkempt nature there lay the delicacy, the generosity, the noble trustfulness of a gentleman born--not made. But my chief reason for what I have written is to make a sort of excuse for reprinting portions of these papers, and of some others which have appeared from time to time in the _Scotsman_. I reprint them mainly, it must be confessed, to fill up the volume, having failed to do what I had purposed in the way of new matter, from want of leisure; and I suspect also from want of material. I therefore must be understood as making much the same sort of apology as a housewife makes for a cold dinner,--a want of time, and, it may be, a want of beef.

Most men have, and almost every man should have, a hobby: it is exercise in a mild way, and does not take him away from home; it diverts him; and by having a double line of rails, he can manage to keep the permanent way in good condition. A man who has only one object in life, only one line of rails, who exercises only one set of faculties, and these only in one way, will wear himself out much sooner than a man who shunts himself every now and then, and who has trains coming as well as going; who takes in as well as gives out.

My hobby has always been pictures, and all we call Art. I have fortunately never been a practitioner, though I think I could have made a tolerable hand; but unless a man is a thoroughly good artist, he injures his enjoyment, generally speaking, of the art of others. I am convinced, however, that to enjoy art thoroughly, every man must have in him the possibility of doing it as well as liking it.

He must feel it in his fingers, as well as in his head and at his eyes; and it must find its way from all the three to his heart, and be emotive.

Much has been said of the power of Art to refine men, to soften their manners, and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through wThich it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate and bedevil mankind; but it is a symptom, and a fatal one, when Art ministers to a nation's vice, and glorifies its naughtiness --as in old Rome, as in Oude--as also too much in places nearer in time and place than the one and the other. The truth is, Art, unless quickened from above and from within, has in it nothing beyond itself, which is visible beauty--the ministration to the lust, the desire of the eye. But apart from direct spiritual worship, and self-dedication to the Supreme, I do not know any form of ideal thought and feeling which may be made more truly to subserve, not only magnanimity, but the purest devotion and godly fear; by fear, meaning that mixture of love and awe, which is specific of the realization of our relation to God. I am not so silly as to seek painters to paint religious pictures in the usual sense: for the most part, I know nothing so profoundly profane and godless as our sacred pictures; and I can't say I like our religious beliefs to be symbolized, even as Mr. Hunt has so grandly done in his picture of the Light of the World. But if a painter is himself religious; if he feels God in what he is looking at, and in what he is rendering back on his canvas: if he is impressed with the truly divine beauty, infinity, perfection, and meaning of unspoiled material nature--the earth and the fulness thereof, the heaven and all its hosts, the strength of the hills, the sea and all that is therein; if he is himself impressed with the divine origin and divine end of all visible things,--then will he paint religious pictures and impress men religiously, and thus make good men better, and possibly make bad men less bad. Take the landscapes of our own Harvey. He is my dear old friend of thirty years, and his power as a painter is only less than his fidelity and ardour as a friend, and that than his simple, deep-hearted piety; I never see one of his transcripts of nature, be they solemn and full of gloom, with a look "that threatens the profane or laughing all over with sunshine and gladness, but I feel something beyond, something greater and more beautiful than their greatness and their beauty--the idea of God, of the beginning and the ending, the first and the last, the living One; of whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things; who is indeed God over all, blessed for ever; and whom I would desire, in all humbleness of mind, to sanctify in my heart, and to make my fear and my dread. This is the true moral use of Art, to quicken and deepen and enlarge our sense of God. I don't mean so much our belief in certain articulate doctrines, though I am old-fashioned enough to think that we must know what as well as in whom we believe--that our religion, like everything else, must "have its seat in reason, and be judicious I refer rather to that temper of the soul, that mood of the mind in which we feel the unseen and eternal, and bend under the power of the world to come.

In my views as to the office of the State I hold with John Locke and Coventry Dick,* that its primary, and probably its only function is to protect us from our enemies and from ourselves: that to it is intrusted by the people "the regulation of physical force and that is indeed little more than a transcendental policeman.

* In the thin octavo, The Office of the State, and in its twin volume on Church Polityy there will be found in clear, strong, and singularly candid language, the first lines of the sciences of Church and State politics. It does not say much for the sense and perspicuity of the public mind, if two such books are allowed to fall aside, and such a farrago of energetic nonsense and error as Mr. Buckle's first, and we trust last, volume on Civilisation, is read, and admired, and bought, with its bad logic, its bad facts, and its bad conclusions. In bulk and in value his volume stands in the same relation to Mr. Dick's, as a handful, I may say a gowpctt of chaff does to a grain of wheat, ora bushel of sawdust to an ounce of meal.