8 HENRY, LOED BROUGHAM. 



Sir Charles Bell thus gracefully refers to his association in the editorship of 

 Pitlcy : — "It was at the desire of the Lord Chancellor Brougham that the 

 author wrote the essay on Animal Mechanics ; and it was probably from a belief 

 that the author felt the importance of the subjects touched upon in that essay, 

 that his Lordship was led to do him the further honour of asking him to join 

 with him in illustrating the Natural Theology of Dr. Bale)-." 



Among the lighter labours of Lord Brougham — recreations they may be termed 

 — are his Sketches of Eminent Statesmen, Men of Letters, and Philosophers, of 

 the time of George III. The philosophers comprise Watt, Priestley, Cavendish, 

 Davy, Simsou, Adam Smith, Lavoisier, Banks, and D'Alembert. Although 

 these sketches will scarcely beat the test of historical or biographical accuracy, 

 they are delightful to read, have much of the piquancy of the French meuxjire, and 

 are' full of lively anecdote and pleasantry ; although they are varied with graver 

 matter, as in an abstruse mathematical paper to be found in the Life of 

 D'Alembert ; and a long paper on Greek Geometry in the Life of Simson. On the 

 other hand, how familiarly are Franklin's characteristics summed up in these 

 few lines : — " Of all this great man's scientific excellencies, the most remarkable 

 is the smallness, the simplicity, the apparent inadequacy, of the means which he 

 employed in his experimental researches. His discoveries were all made with 

 scarcely any apparatus at all ; and if, at any time, he had been led to employ 

 instruments of a somewhat less ordinary description, he never rested satisfied 

 until he had, as it were, afterwards translated the process, by resolving the 

 problem with such simple machinery, that you might say he had done it wholly 

 unaided by apparatus. The experiments by which the identity of lightning and 

 electricity" was demonstrated were all made with a sheet of brown paper, a bit of 

 twine or silk thread, and an iron key !" 



Lord Brougham's contributions toXhe Edinburgh Review fill three large library 

 volumes : they are rhetorical and historical; upon foreign policy, constitutional 

 questions, political economy and finance, and criminal law ; and, what is more 

 to our purpose, in physical science. An able critic in the Examiner has observed 

 of the entire work : — its great charm is, that it does not merely extend over a 

 range of subjects singularly wide, but that every topic along the range is dis- 

 cussed with a mastery of its essential features, rendering the extent and the ver- 

 satility alike astonishing. 



Great men are, however, liable to great mistakes ; and one of Lord Brougham's 

 early criticisms is an instance of this fallibility. The first reception of Dr. 

 Thomas Young's investigations on Light was very unfavourable. In 1801 he made 

 his grand discovery of the principle of interferences in the undulatory theory 

 of Light ; and in that and the two following years, he read to the Koyal Society 

 memoirs which established the theory on grounds that have since been almost 

 universally recognised as irrefragable. Hut they were attacked by Mr. Brougham, 

 in the Edinburgh JCevieic, with great acerbity, of which the following is a speci- 

 men : — 



" We demand, if the world of science which Newton once illuminated, is to 

 be as changeable in its modes as the world of fashion which is directed by the 

 nod of a suly woman or a pampered fop ? Has the Royal Society degraded its 

 publications into bulletins of new and fashionable theories for the ladies of the 

 Koyal Institution? 1'ruh pudor 1 Let the professor continue to amuse his 

 audience with an endless variety of such harmless trilles, but in the name of 

 science, let them not fhul admittance into that venerable repository which con- 

 tains the works of Newton, and Boyle, and Cavendish, and Maskelyne, and 

 Hersclul." 



Further on, the reviewer impugns the account of an experiment made by 

 Young, the deductions from which were of themselves almost Boifioienl to 

 establish the correctness of the undulatory theory: it was, indeed, a crucial 

 experiment. Dr. Young replied in these triumphant words: — "Conscious of 

 inability to explain the experiment, i"" ungenerous to confess that inability, 



and too idle to repeat the experiment, he is compelled to advance the supposi- 

 tion that it was incorrect." This reply was printed by Dr. Young in a pamphlet, 

 of "Inch only one copy was sold! The Edinburgh Bevteto had the effect 01 

 checking the advance of the undulatory theory. Justice, however, oame at 



length; and the discover] which Brougham had levelled With all his powers of 



Bares mi, has, iii the words of sir John llerschel, " proved tlve key to all the more 



abstruse and puzzling properties of light, and which would alone ha\ e sufficed 



to place the author in the highest rank of 'scientific hnmortahty, even were his 



