David Brewster, born at Jedburgh, Dec. 11, 1781, and educated for the Church of Scotland, undertook the editorship of the “Edinburgh Encyclopædia” in 1808. He received honorary degrees from various Universities in England and Scotland. In 1815 the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal for his discovery of the law of the polarization of light by reflexion; in 1816 the Institute of France adjudged him half of the prize of 3,000 francs given for the most important discoveries made in Europe in any branch of science during the two preceding years; and in 1819 the Royal Society awarded him the Rumford gold and silver medals. In 1825 he was elected a corresponding member of the Institute of France; in 1832 was knighted by William IV.; and in 1848 was elected one of the eight foreign associates of the Imperial Institute of France. He became principal of the united colleges of St. Salvator, St. Leonard and St. Andrews, in 1838, Principal of the University of Edinburgh in 1859, and died Feb. 10, 1868. Sir D. Brewster, who made many important inventions, amongst which lenses for light-houses and the kaleidoscope are best known, wrote “The Martyrs of Science,” published in 1846; “More Worlds Than One,” being an answer to Dr. Whewell’s “Plurality of Worlds,” in 1854; “Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton,” in 1855; numerous scientific works, and contributed to the Quarterly Reviews, and to the Transactions of scientific societies.
Personal
As to Brewster, though he and I are as nearly opposite as two persons can well be, whom the world would class together, yet I found it a very tolerable and even not unpleasant thing to spend a week in his society, especially as I had the society of so many others at the same time. “All things are less dreadful than they seem,” and a human interest and kindness can temper usefully the sense of philosophical difference.
I thank God, with all my heart, for His departed servant that now, when the battle is over, he fought the good fight so well, and in days of doubt, and of darkness, and of declension, kept the faith—not only kept, but clung to it. He was one who was not ashamed in the highest assemblies of the land to stand up as a Christian, and avow himself a believer…. He knew the difference, which some seem not to see, between the sphere of revealed religion and that of arts and sciences. Theirs is the region for discoveries, and new truths, and novelties—for something the world never saw, or thought of, or dreamed of before—for the progress that lies between the first log-hut which screened its tenants from the storm, and the proud palace of kings; that lies between the path man cut in the primeval forest, and the iron road along which he skims with fire and water yoked to his chariot wheels; that lies between those beacon fires that blazed far and near on your border hills, carrying the news of invasion across the land, and the wires by which I flash a message from the Old World to the New, through the bowels of the mountains and depths of the sea.
Brewster’s character was peculiarly liable to misconstruction from its distinctly dual nature; it was made up of opposites, and his peculiarly impulsive temperament and expressions laid him open to the charge of inconsistency, although he never recognised it in himself, conscious that he spoke what was consistent with the point of view whence he took his observations at the time. Accustomed to look at every subject with the critical investigation of the man of science, he yet united the feelings of the man of impulse, and he spoke as moved by either habit.
General
A philosopher who, while supreme in his own special walk, is perhaps of all living men the most extensively acquainted with the general domain of physical science.
Since his own scientific sensibilities are keen,… we hope they will make him fully feel that he has linked his own name to that of his first object of human reverence [“Life of Newton”] for as long as our century shall retain a place in literary history. This will be conceded by all, how much soever they may differ from the author in opinions or conclusions; and though we shall proceed to attack several of Sir D. Brewster’s positions, and though we have no hesitation in affirming that he is too much of a biographer, and too little of an historian, we admire his earnest enthusiasm, and feel as strongly as any one of his assentients the service he has rendered to our literature.
It is remarked of Brewster’s style that while in his youth it was severe and almost cold, confining itself to rigid scientific statement, it became in his later days warm and glowing, giving free scope to the imagination and the fancy.
The writings of Sir David Brewster present a remarkable union of the man of science with the man of letters. The experimental philosopher is seldom a master of rhetoric; but Sir David, far beyond the appointed period of threescore-and-ten, was full of fancy and imagination, and had a copious and flowing style.
We think of Brewster, the experimental philosopher, who combined in so extraordinary a degree the strictest severity of scientific argument and form with a freedom of fancy and imagination which lent picturesqueness to all his illustrations and invested his later writings especially with an indefinable charm.
A work [“Life of Newton”] of sterling merit, though not invariably accurate, and entering largely into details which, as unintelligible to general readers, have no business in an ordinary biography, and had better have been more thoroughly treated of apart in a monograph for students of science.
He may, therefore, be regarded, apart from his other claims to distinction, as one of those who did much to popularise physical science. But, as his successor in St. Andrews so justly remarked, if “his scientific glory is different in kind from that of Young and Fresnel, as the discoverer of the law of polarisation of biaxal crystals, of optical mineralogy, and of double refraction by compression, he will always occupy a foremost rank in the intellectual history of the age.”
Among the most prominent figures in the scientific world at the commencement of the reign was one also well known in wider fields of literature, David Brewster.
