953 



BROWN, THOMAS. 



BROWN, THOMAS. 



951 



grades in his profession, rising to the rank of commander in 1811, and 

 accepting that of retired captain in 1842. 



It-is however as a civil engineer that Sir Samuel Brown has claim to 

 remembrance. To his ability and ingenuity may be ascribed the intro- 

 duction into use of both chain-cables and suspension-bridges. The 

 idea of substituting iron cables in the place of those made from hemp, 

 first occurrel to M. de Bougainville, whose account of a voyage which 

 he made round the world was published in 1771. [BOUGAINVILLE, 

 Louis A. DE.] But the idea was not put in practice ; and though a 

 patent was taken out by a Mr. Slater, a surgeon in the British army, 

 in 1808, little was done until Captain Brown carried out a series of 

 experiments, the results of which were deemed so satisfactory that 

 the Board of Admiralty ordered iron chain-cables to be tried iu the 

 navy. Their use, it need hardly be added, has since become general. 

 Iron suspension-bridges had, as is well known, been erected in several 

 instances both in America and Europe before Captain Brown directed 

 his attention to them. But they were generally regarded as insecure, 

 except for crossing narrow streams, until Brown introduced his 

 improved method of constructing chains for suspending the roadway. 

 Instead of chains of the ordinary construction, he proposed to form 

 them of long bars of flat or round iron, pinned together by short 

 links and bolt-pins. He made a model of his invention iu 1813, having 

 however designed and prepared specifications for suspension-bridges 

 much earlier, but he did not obtain his patent till 1817. Brown's plan 

 was soon after adopted in principle by Telford (who had in the first 

 instance proposed to use cables of merely the ordinary construction) 

 in the erection of his magnificent bridge over the Meuai Strait. The 

 first extensive bridge erected wholly on Captain Brown's plan was the 

 Union Bridge which crosses the Tweed at Berwick, in which the length 

 of the chord-line between the points of suspension is 449 feet : it was 

 opene.1 for use in July 1820. In 1821 Captain Brown commenced the 

 construction of the Trinity suspension-pier at Newhaven near Edin- 

 burgh. He subsequently erected several other bridges and piers, but 

 it may suffice to mention, as his great work, the suspension-pier at 

 Brighton, which consists of four openings of 255 feet each, with a 

 deflection of 13 feet. The Brighton pier has suffered considerable 

 damage on two occasions in severe storms, but, as subsequently 

 strengthened, it has successfully withstood others of excessive force. 



Captain Brown was knighted iu 1835. He died on the 15th of 

 March, 1852. 



BROWN, THOMAS, better known by the familiar name of 'Tom 

 Brown,' was born in Shropshire in the year 1663. At the age of fifteen 

 he entered as a servitor of Christ Church, Oxford ; but he left the 

 university in disgrace without taking a degree, and, going to London, 

 became a Grub-street writer. The most respectable part of his career 

 was his holding for a short time the mastership of the free school at 

 Kingston-upon-Thames. Among those hangers-on of literature whose 

 character and conduct made the title of author disreputable in the 

 latter part of the 17th ceutury, Tom Brown was one of the most 

 notorious. He was habitually attached to vicious indulgences, invete- 

 rately fond of low society, and indolent to a degree which made him 

 unfit to earn his bread steadily by the equivocal kind of literary 

 labour which was his trade. But his talents were of no mean order. 

 Hia published writings, almost all of which were satirical squibs in 

 prose or verse, are full of coarse and humorous buffoonery. Their 

 gross personalities however more than once brought him into trouble, 

 aud were restrained by no considerations either of safety or of decency. 

 Dryden, Sherlock, and Titus Oates, alike suffered under his lash. His 

 earliest pamphlet, ' The Reason of Mr. Bayes changing his Religion,' 

 appeared in 1388 ; and from that time till his death in 1704 he con- 

 tinued, by a series of ephemeral productions, to justify Anthony Wood's 

 description of him as "a frequent and satirical writer." Wood gives 

 a catalogue of his publications. They are not nearly all included in 

 a collection professing to contain his works, which appeared in four 

 small volumes in 17U7, and was several times reprinted before the 

 middl- of the last century. 



BROWN, THOMAS, son of the Rev. Samuel Brown, was born on 

 the 9th of January 1778, at the manse of the parish of Kirkmabreck, 

 in the Stewartry of Kircudbright. 



About a year after her husband's death Mrs. Brown removed with her 

 family to Edinburgh. Many stories are told of Thomas's early fondness 

 for books and general precocity, but they are probably of little more 

 value than the usual run of these infantile anecdotes. About his 

 eighth year he was removed to a school at Chiswick, in which the 

 present Lord Lyndhurst was one of his class fellows. His last school, 

 which he left in his sixteenth year, was Dr. Thomson's at Kensington. 

 In 1792, he returned to Edinburgh; and in the session of 1792-3 

 studied logic in the University of Edinburgh under Dr. Finlayson. 

 Spending a part of the ensuing summer in Liverpool, he became 

 acquainted with Dr. Currie, who put into his hinds a copy of 

 Stewart's 'Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind." Brown 

 was struck with an inconsistency in the doctrines of Stewart ; he 

 pointed it out to Dr. Currie, and next winter, when attending 

 Stewart's dent, he was bold enough to state it to him at the close of 

 one of his lecture.*. Ste>vart heard him patiently, and read a letter to 

 him from M. Prevoat of Geneva, containing the same objection. Stewart 

 held that in sleep the operations of the mind which depend on the 

 will are suspended, along with the doctrine that memory depends on 



attention, the creature of the will ; the objection la obvious, why then 

 do we remember our dreams? The acuteness which exposed the 

 error consists more in seeing it through the glozes and colouring 

 under which it was hid, than in the objection itself. The professor 

 invited his pupil to his house, but never disputed with him. 



For several years Brown attended the lectures of Stewart, Robison, 

 Play fair, and Black : his evenings were generally spent in conversational 

 discussions on all sorts of subjects with his friends Homer, Leyden, 

 Reddie, and Erskine. 



When little more than eighteen years of age, the remarks he had 

 made in reading Darwin's ' Zoonomia ' had swelled from a few notes, 

 for an article in a periodical, to the size of a book. Before printing 

 it, by the advice of Professor Stewart, he sent his MS. to Darwin, who 

 received it very dryly, and answered it with no little asperity. In 

 the beginning of 1798 appeared, in one voL 8vo. ' Observations on the 

 Zoonomia ' of Erasmus Darwin, M.D., by Thomas Brown, Esq. The 

 preface, which contains the germ of his doctrine of causation, was 

 especially admired. Brown often attacks a false theory with weapons 

 equally fallacious, and the errors and excellences of his book have the 

 same source, the delight of a young and acute mind in the detection 

 of inconsistencies. One example will be sufficient. Darwin holds that 

 irritation, sensation, volition, and association are essential qualities 

 of every particle of sensorial power; a dogma which Brown con- 

 sidered that he refuted by the inference, that every individual must 

 in this case be made up of a multitude of distinct beings. 



In 1796 he studied law for a year, a profession in which his 

 friends augured success from his acuteness. Becoming convinced 

 however that astuteness and not subtlety of intellect was the successful 

 quality at the bar, and finding the joint pursuit of legal and literary 

 knowledge incompatible with his health, he began, in 1798, to study 

 for the profession of medicine. In 1803, when he took his diploma 

 as M.D., his thesis 'De Somno ' excited the admiration of his examiners. 



About 1793 Brown joined a debating society in the University, in 

 which he argued against theism ; a circumstance which was used 

 against him in after life. A few of the members of the Literary 

 Society formed themselves in 1797 into the Academy of Physics, a 

 society for the " investigation of nature, the laws by which her phe- 

 nomena are regulated, aud the history of opinions concerning those 

 lawa" The names of Erskine, Brougham, Reddie, Brown, Rogerson, 

 Birkbeck, Logan, and Loyden were immediately enrolled ; and they 

 were soon after joined by Lord Webbe Seymour, Horner, Jeffrey, 

 Smith, Gillespie, &c. From this society arose the ' Edinburgh Review," 

 to which Brown contributed two or three articles in the beginning, 

 but owing to some liberties taken with a paper of his in the third 

 number his connection with it ceased. The first article in the second 

 number is by Brown, on the ' Philosophy of Kant ; ' a subject of 

 which he knew very little. All he knew of Kant's doctrines was 

 derived from a fantastic French account of them ; and though acute 

 and just remarks occur in his critique, it is as bad as his preparation 

 for writing it was imperfect. 



A few mouths after taking his degree Brown published two volumes 

 of poems written while he was at college. They pleased, it is said, 

 the ladies and great people whom they praised ; but poems on the 

 'Sun,' the 'Moon,' the 'Frown of Love,' and the 'War Fiend,' 

 attracted little notice from any one else. 



In pursuance of a system they had long adopted, what is called in 

 Edinburgh the high church party, on the promotion of Professor 

 Playfair to the chair of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edin- 

 burgh, determined to elect a clergyman to the chair of Mathematics, 

 although the superiority of Mr. Leslie, the lay candidate, was incon- 

 testable. The approbation which this gentleman, in a note to his 

 ' Essay on Heat,' had expressed of Hume's doctrine of causation was 

 made tue ground of a charge of infidelity. Brown published a 

 pamphlet on the occasion, in which he proved that no such conse- 

 quences flowed from the doctrine. In an extended and improved form 

 this pamphlet has passed through several editions. The substance of 

 the doctrine of causation which it contains is this : " A cause is that 

 which immediately precedes any change, and which existing at any 

 time in similar circumstances has been always and will be always 

 immediately followed by a similar change. Priority in the sequence 

 observed, and in variableness of antecedence in the past and future 

 sequences supposed, are the elements and the only elements com- 

 bined iu the notion of a cause. By a conversion of terms we obtain 

 a definition of the correlative effect ; and power is only another word 

 for expressing abstractly and briefly the antecedence itself, and the 

 invariableuess of the relation. The words property and quality admit 

 of exactly the same definition, expressing only a certain relation of 

 invariable antecedence and consequence in changes that take place on 

 the presence of the substance to which they are ascribed ; with this 

 difference, that property and quality as commonly used comprehend 

 both the powers and susceptibility of substances the powers of pro- 

 ducing changes and the susceptibilities of being changed ; and with 

 this difference only, power, property, and quality are in the physical 

 use of these terms exactly synonymous. Water has the power of 

 melting salt ; it is a property of water to melt salt ; it is a quality of 

 water to melt saR : all these varieties of expression signify precisely 

 the same thing that when water is poured upon salt the solid will 

 take the form of a liquid, and its particles be diffused in continued 



