Ixx 



the Fellowship of our Society ; and this was followed three years after- 

 wards by the Rumford Medal, and subsequently by one of the Royal 

 Medals ; and, singularly enough, in each case for discoveries concerning the 

 Polarization of Light. In 1816 the French Institute awarded him a 

 pecuniary prize, and nine years afterwards he became a Corresponding 

 Member of that body; while in 1849 there was conferred upon him the 

 distinguished honour of being chosen one of the eight Foreign Associates of 

 the Academy of Sciences. 



It would be tedious to enumerate his other honours from learned bodies 

 at home and abroad ; suffice it to add that he was made a Chevalier of the 

 Prussian Order of Merit, and was knighted by his sovereign in 1832. 



Sir David was twice married : first to the daughter of Jam^s Macpher- 

 son, M.P., of Belleville, the translator of Ossian, and afterwards to Jane 

 Kirk, second daughter of the late Thomas Purnell, Esq., of Scarborough. 



To give any adequate idea of the discoveries made known in those scien- 

 tific papers which Sir David Brewster published 'every two or three months 

 for sixty years, would be a task of gigantic magnitude. There seem to be 

 thirty papers by him in our Transactions, principally in the earlier part of 

 his career, and, with two exceptions, they are all on optical subjects. In 

 1813 he commenced with a communication " On some Properties of Light," 

 and in the two succeeding years our Society published for him no less than 

 nine papers — on the polarization of light by oblique transmission, by its 

 passage through unannealed glass, by simple pressure, or by reflection, and 

 on the optical properties of mother-o'-pearl, on calcareous spar. The phe- 

 nomena of double refraction were indeed treated of in several subsequent 

 papers ; but there is a gap between 1819 and 1829, when he wrote on the 

 periodical colours produced by grooved surfaces, investigated elliptic polari- 

 zation by metals, and reverted to the optical nature of the crystalline lens. 

 Two papers, one on the Diamond and the other on the Colours of Thin 

 Plates, terminate this series in 1841 ; and the only paper he afterwards 

 sent to our Transactions was one in conjunction with Dr. Gladstone on the 

 Lines of the Solar Spectrum. But there seems never to have been any long 

 intermission in his researches on light ; for he was constantly sending com- 

 munications on this subject to the Royal Society of Edinburgh or some 

 other learned body, or to the various scientific serials with which he was 

 connected. Thus in the first Number of the Edinburgh Philosophical 

 Journal we find two papers from his pen, the first on new optical and 

 mineralogical structure exhibited in certain specimens of Apophyllite and 

 other minerals, the second on the Phosphorescence of Minerals. 



It was as a laborious observer and ingenious experimenter that he ex- 

 celled ; he cared rather to collect a multitude of facts than to deduce from 

 them general laws. Wonderful proofs of perseverance are his Tables of 

 refractive indices, of dispersive powers, and of the polarizing angles of va- 

 rious reflecting bodies ; and he seems to have submitted to optical exami- 



