34 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
he lived there with his family, till the interference of railways 
with its amenity drove him to Babbicombe, in Devonshire, where 
he continued those benevolent labours which he had so zealously 
prosecuted during his residence in Edinburgh. 
Mr Bonar was elected a Fellow of this Society in 1822. He 
took a great interest in matters of science, but specially in the 
great inventions which were in his time bearing such noble fruit. 
Mr Bonar died at Malvern, where he had gone for the recovery 
of his health, on the 9th of November 1866, at the age of 68. 
James Stevenson was born at Paisley on the 28th April 1786, 
and was the son of Mr Stevenson, a silk-gauze manufacturer in 
that town. He was educated at the Grammar School there, and 
afterwards went to Glasgow, where he remained for thirty years 
in business as a merchant and cotton-spinner. In 1844 he re- 
moved to South Shields, where he became senior partner in the 
Jarrow Chemical Works, the importance and extent of which 
were greatly increased by his energy and talents for business. 
At South Shields he took a deep interest in the welfare of the 
working classes, founding excellent schools for their children, and 
reducing, as far as practicable, the work usually done on the 
Sabbath. He established the “ North and South Shields Gazette,” 
a newspaper by which the public interests of these two large 
towns were greatly advanced. Mr Stevenson was likewise the 
most active promoter of a company for supplying South Shields 
with water, which previously had been chieliy derived from surface 
wells. He was an elder in the Free Church, and an active and 
liberal friend of the Presbyterian Church in England. 
In 1854 he retired from active business, and spent the rest of 
his life in Edinburgh. He was elected a Fellow of this Society 
in 1865, and he died in his house, in Randolph Crescent, on the 
13th June 1866, in the 81st year of his age. 
William Thomas Brande, an eminent chemist, was born in 
1786, and was the grandson of a physician who came from Hanover 
with one of the Georges. After being educated at Westminster 
School, he went to complete his education in Hanover, but, on 
account of the disturbed state of Germany, he returned to England 
