1 62 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. VII. 



without fear of disturbing literary work, as lassitude forbade 

 any attempt at it. 



In the previous summer, George Wilson's generous nature 

 had been aroused on behalf of his friend Dr. Samuel Brown, 

 whose experiments on transmutation were exciting intense 

 interest in the minds of scientific men. The fifty simple 

 elements, up to this time believed to be indecomposible, he 

 asserted were capable of transmutation, one instance of 

 which he gave in processes for transforming carbon into 

 silicon. Dr. Brown was a candidate for the Chemistry 

 Chair in the Edinburgh University, then vacant, and his 

 success in gaining it seemed to hang upon the confirmation 

 of his new views. Invalid though George then was, he left 

 no stone unturned on his behalf; and in a letter to the 

 Lord Provost, in September 1843, printed and widely cir- 

 culated, though not published, he strongly advocated Dr. 

 Brown's claims on the Chair, independently of the transmu- 

 tation experiments. With this preface, we turn to George's 

 letters for information as to his occupations during the 

 session 1843-44, in which he laboured to verify the ex- 

 periments in question, and which afford an example of 

 devotion to a friend's interest with few parallels, if any, in 

 the annals of science. 



In October he laments the absence of his friend Dr. 

 Cairns, who had left for the Continent : " I cannot tell 

 you," he writes, "how much I shall miss you on Sabbath- 

 days. I have not much prospect of being often inside a 

 church this winter, and I feel how great my tendency is to 

 grow languid in earnest devotional feeling when cut off from 

 communion with fellow-Christians. But is not the very 

 isolation from others as much intended for a part of pre- 

 paratory probation as sore physical agony or mental distress 1 

 It must be so, and the conviction that it is, soothes my regret 



