14 
Charles Davidson Bell. By the Astronomer-Boy al for 
Scotland. 
Late and for long the Surveyor-General of our vast colony of the 
Cape of Good Hope, elected an Ordinary Bellow of this Society on 
March 4, 1878. Died here on the 7th of April 1882, aged 69. 
Born at Newhall, in the parish of Crail, in the East Neuk of 
Bife, in 1813, in a family of three, and of so long lived a race that 
his mother lived to 85, his father attained to 90, his father’s elder 
brother, General Sir John Bell, a leading officer of the Staff Corps 
in the Peninsular War, and highly approved of by the Duke of 
Wellington, reached the still nobler age of 95, and a grand-aunt 
lived to be 101, while his own brother and sister are still living, 
hale and hearty ; — it might therefore have been hoped, that when 
Charles D. Bell retired from southern official life to this country, in 
1874, there were yet many years before him, wherein to exercise at 
leisure the many fine talents wherewith he was gifted, and in a 
manner to show forth something of the fervid love and even 
ecstatic devotion he always bore to his native land, notwithstanding 
his long separation from it. 
But that was not to be. The trials and the stresses he had gone 
through in the South African climate and country were too many 
and too severe, however successfully they seemed to be overcome at 
the time. Success, indeed, usually crowned almost everything he 
undertook ; and he would have had a far more notable name among 
us had his career been confined to Old Scotland, instead of being 
spent so entirely as it was from his sixteenth to his sixty-first year 
in that new and greater Scotland which stretches now all across the 
ffiobe, from Canada in the north-west to Australia and New Zealand 
O ' 
in the south-east, with the Cape as a very central stronghold. 
Originally, no doubt, the Cape was a Dutch colony, but one wherein 
it was long ago remarked to me, that among the many British 
residents that had come flocking in, every one who got on best, 
whether in the higher or lower walks of life, was always a Scotch- 
man. And one of the most noteworthy of those, because mainly by 
such original efforts and innate qualities of his own, was the subject 
of this notice. 
Though leaving his country at so early an age (in 1829), Charles 
