Black of his grand discoviery of latent heat ; and it is an nnfor- 

 jtunate circumstance that the President should have been spe- 

 cially requested by the same Council to draw up a discourse, 

 in which another of our coimtnjmen should have been deprived 

 of an honour so justly due to hirn." That we were not singu- 

 lar in drawing the conclusion we published, will appear from 

 the fact that Mr. Harcourt speaks of the writer of the passages 

 we have quoted as "a northern critic who views this question 

 of individual justice as one of national honour*." We are 

 at, a loss, indeed, to understand how any one who reads the 

 passages we have selected, can differ from us in opinion, and 

 are surprised that Sir David Brewster should judge us so 

 harshly, because we have said that " he chose to consider it 

 a national question," which it seems to us he certainly did. 

 ■\^[ Whether Sir David Brewster acted judiciously in thus ap- 

 pealing to the feelings of our scientific men as Englishmen and 

 Scotchmen, is a matter of opinion. We think that he acted 

 unwisely in so doing, the more so, that the great advocate of 

 Cavendish, viz. Harcourt, was an Englishman, and many mem- 

 bers of the Council of the British Association were Cavendish's 

 countrymen also, and could not but find something unpleasant 

 in the passages which we have quoted. We believe, accord- 

 ingly, as we have implied in the paragraph to which Sir David 

 Brewster objects, that he greatly injured the effect of his state- 

 ments by his allusions to nationality. Sir David, however, 

 need not attribute to us, on that account, any concealed pur- 

 pose of insinuating against him a charge of dishonesty, or par- 

 tiality, in adjudicating between Watt and Cavendish. We 

 can only emphatically say, that we had no intention of attri- 

 buting any such motive to him. 



Sir David Brewster's reply to the second point is as folT 

 lows : — " In place of dividing the merit of the discovery be- 

 tween the Englishman and the Scotch man, and giving the lion's 

 share to my countryman, I have given the whole merit of the 

 discovery to Cavendish the Englishman, and have reserved 

 only for Watt the Scotchman the merit of the previous hypo- 

 thesis." In reference to this, we have only to say, that Sir 

 David, in rebutting our charge, takes for granted that our 

 estimate of " the lion's share " is the same as his own ; in other 

 words, not to ring the changes on that phrase, he conceives 

 that we are at one with him as to what the merits of the question 

 between Watt and Cavendish are, whilst we have totally mis- 

 stated his views regarding them. Accordingly, he is at a loss 



= ; * Report of the Ninth Meeting of the British Association. Postscript to 

 the President's Address, p. 23. 



