Ohituary Notices. 
Ixi 
Thomas Stevenson, C.E. By Professor Swan. 
(Read July 15, 1895.) 
Thomas Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on the 22nd July 
1818. His and my own grandfather was Thomas Smith, the first 
engineer to the Board of Northern Lights ; and his father was 
Robert Stevenson, who succeeded Mr Smith in that office, which 
he held for the long period of forty-five years, and who was the 
designer of the Bell Rock Lighthouse. This tower, built under his 
personal superintendence before the days of steam navigation, on a 
lowdying reef continually submerged during neap-tides, was a work 
of peculiar difficulty, and its successful accomplishment an achieve- 
ment probably not yet surpassed in lighthouse construction. 
Thomas Stevenson and I received our first schooling from Alex- 
ander Brown, then well known in Edinburgh as a highly-accom- 
plished teacher of English, but who was also an exceedingly severe 
disciplinarian. Neither of us suffered much from Brown’s tawse, 
even although they were not only in continual use in inflict- 
ing palmies, but also not unfrequently in what might be termed 
unlimited flogging. But Tom had rather frequent experience of 
being “ kept in ” after school hours, on account of lessons imperfectly 
prepared ; and, in years long after the times of Brown and of the 
High School of Edinburgh, might be heard to say that none of the 
troubles and trials of his manhood were so hard to bear as the 
sufferings he had endured at school. School discipline in those 
days was indeed too often a system of merest terrorism and repres- 
sion, or repressive terrorism. I have a lively recollection when a 
book, then familiarly known as Ruddiman's Latin Rudiments, 
was first put into my. hands, how I had a strong desire to discover 
whether any occult relation subsisted between the words “ Ruddi- 
man ” and “ Rudiments.” But I dared not ask my tutor, to whom 
putting questions was a crime, and who would have ordered me 
reprovingly to hold my tongue and mind my lesson. 
From Brown’s school Tom proceeded to the High School of 
