[Illustration: A portrait of a man wearing a coat with a high
collar and a wig with a pigtail, presumably Adam Smith.]
June 5.--The anniversary of the birth of ADAM SMITH, the celebrated
author of the ‘Wealth of Nations.’ He was born in 1723, at Kirkaldy, in
the county of Fife, in Scotland, where his father, who died, however, a
few months before he came into the world, was comptroller of the
customs. He was of delicate health from his infancy: and in consequence,
although he was put to school in his native town, he mixed but little in
the out-of-door sports and exercises of his more robust companions; but
during the hours he was not in school occupied himself for the most part
with his books at home. In 1737 he was sent by his mother to the
university of Glasgow, and three years after from thence to Baliol
College, Oxford, on one of several exhibitions, or yearly allowances, to
which Glasgow students are entitled while pursuing their studies at that
college. The intention of Smith’s relations was that he should enter
into orders, with the view of becoming a clergyman in the Scotch
episcopal church. After remaining at Oxford, however, for above eight
years, he gave up all thoughts of this distinction, and, returning to
Scotland, introduced himself to public notice by delivering a course of
lectures on rhetoric and the belles lettres in Edinburgh. The ability
with which he acquitted himself in this attempt brought him the notice
and the friendship of Lord Kames, and several other distinguished
literary men who then resided in the Scottish capital; and in 1751 he
was, through their influence and his own reputation, elected to the
professorship of logic in the university of Glasgow, which he exchanged
the year following for the chair of moral philosophy. He held this
situation for about twelve years, during which time the eloquence and
originality of his lectures rendered him the chief ornament of the
seminary, and attracted crowds of students to his class from all
quarters. His mode of lecturing was not to write out what he intended to
say; but, after making himself completely master of his subject, to
trust to the moment for expression; and in this way, we are told, he
never failed to keep up the eager attention of his audience to the
discussion of even the most difficult and abstract parts of his subject.
In 1759 he gave to the world his first publication, the ‘Theory of Moral
Sentiments.’ It was an exposition of the leading metaphysical views
which he had been in the habit of addressing to his class, the design
being to show that all our feelings and judgments with regard to the
morality of different actions arise from, and are regulated by, the
principle of sympathy, which accordingly he makes the fundamental
characteristic of our mental constitution, and that without which we
could not exist as social beings. This work, when it first appeared, was
more applauded for its ingenuity and the subtlety of thought and beauty
of expression by which many parts of it were marked, than for the
conclusiveness of its reasonings; but still it brought to its author a
large accession of admiration and fame. In 1763 Smith was induced to
resign his professorship for the purpose of accompanying the Duke of
Buccleuch on a tour to France and other parts of the Continent. He was
absent from England about three years, the greater part of which was
spent in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of all the distinguished
literary men of that capital. After his return home, in 1766, he retired
to his native town of Kirkaldy, and taking up his abode in the house of
his mother, spent the next ten years in seclusion and hard study. The
result was the publication, in the year 1776, of his ‘Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,’ a work which may almost be
said to have done for political economy what Sir Isaac Newton’s
Principia did for physical science--laid for it, namely, that new
foundation upon which all that has since been done has been reared. But
of this great work we shall present our readers with a more detailed
account in an early number, under the head of the ‘Library.’ They still,
we believe, show at Kirkaldy the room in Smith’s house in which the
‘Wealth of Nations’ was written, with the impression left upon the wall
by the head of the philosopher as he used to lean back in his chair,
buried in profound thought. Though but a simple memorial, it is one of
which his townsmen may well be proud. In 1778, through the interest of
the Duke of Buccleuch, Smith was appointed to the lucrative office of
commissioner of the customs, in consequence of which he removed with his
mother to Edinburgh, and here he spent the remainder of his life in
comfort and affluence. He died on the 8th of July, 1790, in the
sixty-eighth year of his age.
June 6.--This is the birth-day of PETER CORNEILLE, the greatest of the
French dramatists, who was born at Rouen in 1606. He was educated for
the bar. A love adventure which befel him after he had practised for
some years as an advocate in his native city first turned his thoughts
to dramatic composition, and furnished him with the subject of his
comedy entitled _Mélite_. The success of this piece, when it was
exhibited at Paris, was so great that Corneille determined for the
future to devote himself to writing for the stage. Several of his next
efforts were also comedies; but in 1636 he produced his tragedy of
_Medea_, and, soon after, that of the _Cid_, compositions in which his
genius first displayed itself in its natural region and in its true
grandeur. The ‘Cid’ was followed by a succession of other
tragedies--among which those entitled _Horace_ and _Cinna_ are
especially celebrated, and remain to this day unrivalled in the dramatic
literature of his country. Corneille’s reward during his life-time,
however, consisted of little else than his glory; for it is related that
after the death of Colbert, a pension which that minister had bestowed
upon him was withdrawn, though he was then poor, old, sickly, and dying,
and it was only on the intercession of Boileau, who generously offered
to resign his own pension on condition of Corneille’s being restored to
him, that the king, Louis XIV., was moved to make him a present of 200
louis d’ors. Corneille, after he dedicated himself to the drama,
exhibited a remarkable example of devotion to the path which he had
chosen--studying, we are told, scarcely anything except what bore, or
might be made to bear upon his favourite pursuit. This great man died on
the 1st of October, 1684.
June 8.--The birth-day of JOHN DOMINIC CASSINI, a very celebrated
astronomer, and the progenitor of a son and a grandson of nearly equal
eminence in the same department of science. His family was noble, and he
was born in Piedmont in the year 1635. The accidental perusal, while he
was yet very young, of a work on astronomy, first inspired Cassini with
a taste for that study; and so extraordinary was the progress he made
that, in 1650, being then only about fifteen, he was, on the invitation
of the Senate of Bologna, appointed to the professorship of mathematics
in that university. Two years after this he observed with remarkable
care, a comet which appeared and confirmed the opinion which Tycho Brahe
had published long before respecting the nature of these bodies,
proving, in opposition to the ancient doctrine, that they were not mere
meteors. He also this same year resolved an astronomical problem which
had baffled the ingenuity of the greatest of his predecessors and
contemporaries, and which even Kepler had given up in despair. This
brilliant success at so early an age was followed in the case of Cassini
by a corresponding eminence in his maturer years. In 1669 he left
Bologna for Paris on the earnest invitation of Louis XIV., and was
immediately made a member of the Academy and Astronomer Royal. On the
completion of the Royal Observatory, in 1671, he was appointed to
preside over it. The rest of his life was spent, as the preceding part
of it had been, in the service of his favourite science. Even the loss
of his sight, some years before his death, although it terminated his
actual observation of the heavenly bodies, failed to withdraw his mind
from its wonted field of speculation. He died in 1712, at the age of
seventy-seven, leaving many able works on astronomical and mathematical
subjects.
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THE WEATHER.--No. 1.
No term is more familiar to every body than the term _air_. But if an
uninstructed person were asked what the air was, his first answer would
probably be, that it was nothing at all. This hand, he might say, which
is now plunged in water, on being drawn out of the water is said to be
lifted into the air--which means merely that there is nothing, or only
vacancy, around it. In other words, he might say, the air is just the
name that is given to the empty space, which is immediately over the
surface of the earth.
A little reflection, however, or a question or two more, would probably
raise some doubts as to the correctness of this philosophy. If the air
be nothing, it might be asked, what is the wind? Or what is it, even
when there is no wind, which makes very light substances wave or flutter
on being swiftly drawn through the air, or, when they are merely dropped
from the hand, detains them on their way to the ground? Or, to take
another illustration from the commonest experience, who is there that
has not seen a bladder distended or swollen with air? If the air be
nothing, how comes a portion of it to present such palpable resistance
to pressure, when thus confined?
The truth is, the air _in_ which we walk is as much a real and
substantial part of our world as the earth _on_ which we walk. Empty
space would no more do for our bodies to live in, than it would for our
feet to tread upon. The atmosphere, that is, the case of air in which
the solid globe is enveloped, is composed of matter as well as that
solid globe itself. As the one is matter in a solid, so the other is
matter in a fluid state. It is merely a thinner fluid than the water,
which also rests upon and encompasses a great part of the earth; but as
fishes exist and can only exist in their ocean of water, so do we exist
and can only exist in our ocean of air.
The _weather_ is another term with which every body is familiar. But the
weather is merely the state or condition of the air. Heat and cold,
moisture and drought, wind and calm, all make themselves felt by us
principally in and through this element. The study of the weather is but
the study of the variations of the air.
Man is so dependent upon the weather, not only for his comfort but even
for his subsistence, that to be able to ascertain its coming changes has
naturally always been to him an object of extreme solicitude. When we
are very desirous to attain any end, we are easily deluded by whomsoever
or whatsoever promises to help us in reaching it. The weather is one of
the subjects upon which the credulity of mankind, thus excited, has in
every age been taken plentiful advantage of; and, indeed, it seems to be
the one of all others over which superstition and imposture have
succeeded in establishing the widest and firmest dominion. We have
outlived most of the other fond beliefs of more ignorant times; the love
of money, though as strong and as universal a passion as ever, blinds
nobody now to waste his time in the attempt to discover a solvent for
turning all metals into gold; the desire of long life no longer keeps
our medical chemists busy in experimenting how to extract or compound an
elixir of immortality; these hopes have passed away from the
imaginations both of men of science and of the multitude. Even the
predictions which astrology pretends to draw from the positions and
movements of the stars as to the fates of individuals and kingdoms,
although they have still their readers, have lost much of the old faith
which used to reverence them almost as direct intimations from heaven.
But the prognostications of the same vain science which are published
every year on the subject of the weather continue to be not only bought
but believed in, almost as much as they were in the darkest ages, by
hundreds of thousands, even in our own comparatively enlightened
England. ‘Moore’s Almanac’ still sells a quarter of a million of copies.
If this were the proper place it might not, perhaps, be difficult to
point out the causes which have kept this particular superstition alive
so long after so many others have perished, and been nearly forgotten;
but it will be more to the present purpose to state in a few words the
grounds on which it may be confidently pronounced to be to the full as
visionary and absurd as any of those which it has survived.
The weather, as we have remarked, is but another name for the state of
the air, as to heat or cold, dryness or humidity, rest or motion, and
perhaps one or two other similar particulars. The causes, therefore,
which influence the condition of the air in these respects are those
that occasion the variations of the weather; and these variations cannot
be foretold unless we could calculate and measure the exact force of all
those influencing causes. There is plainly no other way of arriving at
the knowledge in question. To pretend to divine it, as the
almanac-makers affect to do, from the movements of one or two particular
stars, is as idle as it would be to attempt to discover what wind should
blow on a certain day in December by the motion of a bit of straw or
paper thrown up into the air in the preceding January. Even if it were
proved, which it by no means either is or is likely to be, that the
positions of the heavenly bodies in question really exerted any effect
whatever upon our atmosphere, and if the amount of that effect could be
calculated, the ascertainment of it would be of no use, unless we could
also ascertain the force of all the other operating influences. Without
this we are, at the best, merely in the condition of the man who should
attempt to describe the whole of a large building from the inspection of
one of the bricks brought from its ruins. Were our almanac prophets,
therefore, even to take the trouble of going through any calculation to
get at the information with which they favour us, it would not be the
more valuable or trustworthy on that account. But it is almost needless
to remark, that they do not proceed through their work of solemn
quackery and fraud with so much form and ceremony. The “dull, though
mild,” “fair and frosty,” “mild for the season,” “frosty and more fair,”
“rain, perhaps hail,” “windy, perhaps rain,” and other phrases of their
cheating trade, which they scribble at intervals, along the calendar,
are come at by an easier process than even the simplest or shortest
calculation--being in fact, with the exception of course that some
regard is had to the general character of the different seasons, put
down merely at random. There is not an individual among all those by
whom the oracle is consulted, who might not in half an hour manufacture
quite as good a calendar of the weather for himself.
Even the most accomplished science, in truth, has as yet made
comparatively but very little way into this most difficult subject. The
principal properties of the air, both chemical and mechanical, have
indeed been ascertained. The apparently simple element has been
separated into its two component ingredients of nitrogen and oxygen. Its
weight has been taken. Its elasticity, or capability of compression and
expansion, has been measured. Instruments have been invented for
detecting the quantity of heat, or of moisture, or of electricity, with
which it may at any particular moment be charged. But the knowledge of
all these different circumstances and properties enables us to do but
little in predicting the coming changes of the weather. The property of
the air, from the observations of which intimations of this kind have
hitherto been chiefly derived, is its _weight_; and even this can only
tell us at most, what the weather is to be for a few hours forward, and
does not always speak to us to that extent either very certainly or very
precisely.
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