196 Professor RigaucTs Account of James Stirling. 



Society, and he afterwards contributed two papers to the Phi- 

 losophical Transactions. The first of them is in the 39th vo- 

 lume, (for 1735 and 1 736;) it treats of the figure of the earth 

 and the variation of gravity at its surface. His thoughts had 

 been occupied on this subject for a considerable time, for he 

 particularly mentioned it in a letter which, in 1733, he wrote 

 to Bradley, who was his contemporary at Balliol, having en- 

 tered at that same college not three months after him. The 

 letter is dated from Tower Street, and Bradley's* answer was 

 evidently addressed to him in London : some little interval 

 seems to have elapsed before this answer was written ; but 

 whether he was now fixed in the metropolis, or only on an oc- 

 casional visit to it, is uncertain. The other paper is contained 

 in the 43d volume of the Philosophical Transactions, (for 

 1745,) and gives the description of a machine in which a cur- 

 rent of air is supplied by the fall of water, so as to blow up 

 the fire of a furnace. 



It is not known that he published any other works, al- 

 though he lived to a very advanced age. From the Ocntle- 

 mcuis Magazine, (1770, p. 591,) we learn that he died on the 

 5th of December 1770, being then agent to the Scotch mining- 

 company in Leadhills. It is probable that he had been con- 

 nected with that society for many years, or at least there is a 

 circumstance that seems to indicate it ; for, in his paper on 

 the blast-furnace, which was to be urged by the means of a 

 stream of water, he speaks of an engine sufficiently large " to 

 smelt harder ore than any in Leadhills." If the old registers 

 and account books of the company should be still in existence, 

 they may enable us to ascertain whether there is any founda- 

 tion for this conjecture, and may even supply us with some 

 further particulars of the man, whose talents, no doubt, were 

 of the greatest service to the establishment. 





B" 



Oxford, July 1831. 



* Neither of these letters are as yet before the public ; but they will 

 appear in the collection of Bradley's miscellaneous works, which is now in 

 the press at Oxford. 



