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Dr. George Wilson |
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Title: Dr. George Wilson Author: John Brown [More Titles by Brown] Among the many students at our University who some two-and-twenty years ago started on the great race, in the full flush of youth and health, and with that strong hunger for knowledge which only the young, or those who keep themselves so ever know, there were three lads--Edward Forbes, Samuel Brown, and George Wilson--who soon moved on to the front and took the lead. They are now all three in their graves. No three minds could well have been more diverse in constitution or bias; each was typical of a generic difference from the others. What they cordially agreed in, was their hunting in the same field and for the same game. The truth about this visible world, and all that it contains, was their quarry. This one thing they set themselves to do, but each had his own special gift, and took his own road--each had his own special choice of instruments and means. Any one man combining their essential powers, would have been the epitome of a natural philosopher, in the wide sense of the man who would master the philosophy of nature. Edward Forbes, who bulks largest at present, and deservedly, for largeness was of his essence, was the observer proper. He saw everything under the broad and searching light of day, white and uncolored, and with an unimpassioned eye. What he was after were the real appearances of things; _phenomena_ as such; all that seems to be. His was the search after _what is_, over the great field of the world. He was in the best sense a natural historian, an observer and recorder of what is seen and of what goes on, and not less of what has been seen and what has gone on, in this wonderful historic earth of ours, with all its fulness. He was keen, exact, capacious,--tranquil and steady in his gaze as Nature herself. He was, thus far, kindred to Aristotle, to Pliny, Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Humboldt, though the great German, and the greater Stagirite, had higher and deeper spiritual insights than Edward Forbes ever gave signs of. It is worth remembering that Dr. George Wilson was up to his death engaged in preparing his Memoir and Remains for the press. Who will now take up the tale? Samuel Brown was, so to speak, at the opposite pole--rapid, impatient, fearless, full of passion and imaginative power--desiring to divine the essences rather than the appearances of things--in search of the _what_ chiefly in order to question it, make it give up at whatever cost the secret of its _why_; his fiery, projective, subtile spirit, could not linger in the outer fields of mere observation, though he had a quite rare faculty for seeing as well as for looking, which latter act, however, he greatly preferred; but he pushed into the heart and inner life of every question, eager to evoke from it the very secret of itself. Forbes, as we have said, wandered at will, and with a settled purpose and a fine hunting scent, at his leisure, and free and almost indifferent, over the ample fields--happy and joyous and full of work--unencumbered with theory or with wings, for he cared not to fly. Samuel Brown, whose wings were perhaps sometimes too much for him, more ambitious, more of a solitary turn, was forever climbing the Mount Sinais and Pisgahs of science, to speak with Him whose haunt they were,--climbing there all alone and in the dark, and with much peril, if haply he might descry the break of day and the promised land; or, to vary the figure, diving into deep and not undangerous wells, that he might the better see the stars at noon, and possibly find Her who is said to lurk there. He had more of Plato, though he wanted the symmetry and persistent grandeur of the son of Ariston. He was, perhaps, liker his own favorite Kepler; such a man in a word as we have not seen since Sir Humphry Davy, whom in many things he curiously resembled, and not the least is this, that the prose of each was more poetical than the verse. His fate has been a mournful and a strange one, but he knew it, and encountered it with a full knowledge of what it entailed. He perilled everything on his theory; and if this hypothesis--it may be somewhat prematurely uttered to the world, and the full working out of which, by rigid scientific realization, was denied him by years of intense and incapacitating suffering, ending only in death, but the "_relevancy_" of which, to use the happy expression of Dr. Chalmers, we hold him to have proved, and in giving a glimpse of which, he showed, we firmly believe, what has been called that "instinctive grasp which the healthy imagination takes of _possible_ truth",--if his theory of the unity of matter, and the consequent transmutability of the now called elementary bodies, were substantiated in the lower but essential platform of actual experiment, this, along with his original doctrine of atoms and their forces, would change the entire face of chemistry, and make a Cosmos where now there is endless agglomeration and confusion,--would, in a word, do for the science of the molecular constitution of matter and its laws of action and reaction at insensible distances, what Newton's doctrine of gravitation has done for the celestial dynamics. For, let it be remembered, that the highest speculation and proof in this department--by such men as Dumas, Faraday, and William Thomson, and others--points in this direction; it does no more as yet perhaps than point, but some of us may live to see "_resurgam_" inscribed over Samuel Brown's untimely grave, and applied with gratitude and honor to him whose eyes closed in darkness on the one great object of his life, and the hopes of whose "unaccomplished years" lie buried with him. Very different from either, though worthy of and capable of relishing much that was greatest and best in both, was he whom we all loved and mourn, and who, this day week, was carried by such a multitude of mourners to that grave, which to his eye had been open and ready for years. George Wilson was born in Edinburgh in 1818. His father, Mr. Archibald Wilson, was a wine merchant, and died sixteen years ago; his mother, Janet Aitken, still lives to mourn and to remember him, and she will agree with us that it is sweeter to remember him than to have converse with the rest. Any one who has had the privilege to know him, and to enjoy his bright and rich and beautiful mind, will not need to go far to learn where it was that her son George got all of that genius and worth and delightfulness which is transmissible. She verifies what is so often and so truly said of the mothers of remarkable men. She was his first and best _Alma Mater_ and in many senses his last, for her influence over him continued through life. George had a twin brother, who died in early life; and we cannot help referring to his being one of twins, something of that wonderful power of attaching himself, and being personally loved, which was one of his strongest as it was one of his most winning powers. He was always fond of books, and of fun, the play of the mind. He left the High School at fifteen and took to medicine; but he soon singled out chemistry, and, under the late Kenneth Kemp, and our own distinguished Professor of _Materia Medica_, himself a first-class chemist, he acquired such knowledge as to become assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Graham, now Master of the Mint, and then Professor of Chemistry in University College. So he came out of a thorough and good school, and had the best of masters. He then took the degree of M. D., and became a Lecturer in Chemistry, in what is now called the extra-academical school of medicine, but which in our day was satisfied with the title of private lecturers. He became at once a great favorite, and, had his health and strength enabled him, he would have been long a most successful and popular teacher; but general feeble health, and a disease in the ankle-joint requiring partial amputation of the foot, and recurrent attacks of a serious kind in his lungs, made his life of public teaching one long and sad trial. How nobly, how sweetly, how cheerily he bore all these long baffling years; how his bright, active, ardent, unsparing soul lorded it over his frail but willing body, making it do more than seemed possible, and as it were by sheer force of will ordering it to live longer than was in it to do, those who lived with him and witnessed this triumph of spirit over matter, will not soon forget. It was a lesson to every one of what true goodness of nature, elevated and cheered by the highest and happiest of all motives, can make a man endure, achieve, and enjoy. As is well known, Dr. Wilson was appointed in 1855 to the newly-constituted Professorship of Technology, and to the Curatorship of the Industrial Museum. The expenditure of thought, of ingenuity, of research, and management--the expenditure, in a word, of himself--involved in originating and giving form of purpose to a scheme so new and so undefined, and, in our view, so undefinable, must, we fear, have shortened his life, and withdrawn his precious and quite singular powers of illustrating and adorning, and, in the highest sense, sanctifying and blessing science, from this which seemed always to us his proper sphere. Indeed, in the opinion of some good judges, the institution of such a chair at all, and especially in connection with a University such as ours, and the attaching to it the conduct of a great Museum of the Industrial Arts, was somewhat hastily gone into, and might have with advantage waited for and obtained a little more consideration and forethought. Be this as it may, Dr. Wilson did his duty with his whole heart and soul--making a class, which was always increasing, and which was at its largest at his death. We have left ourselves no space to speak of Dr. Wilson as an author, as an academic and popular lecturer, as a member of learned societies, as a man of exquisite literary powers and fancy, and as a citizen of remarkable public acceptation. This must come from some more careful, and fuller, and more leisurely record of his genius and worth. What he was as a friend it is not for us to say; we only know that when we leave this world we would desire no better memorial than to be remembered by many as George Wilson now is, and always will be. His _Life of Cavendish_ is admirable as a biography, full of life, of picturesque touches, and of realization of the man and of his times, and is, moreover, thoroughly scientific, containing, among other discussions, by far the best account of the great water controversy from the Cavendish point of view. His _Life of John Reid_ is a vivid and memorable presentation to the world of the true lineaments, manner of life, and inmost thought and heroic sufferings, as well as of the noble scientific achievements of that strong, truthful, courageous, and altogether admirable man, and true discoverer--a genuine follower of John Hunter. _The Five Gateways of Knowledge_ is a prose poem, a hymn of the finest utterance and fancy--the white light of science diffracted through the crystalline prism of his mind into the colored glories of the spectrum; truth dressed in the iridescent hues of the rainbow, and not the less but all the more true. His other papers in the _British Quarterly_, the _North British Review_, and his last gem on "Paper, Pens, and Ink," in his valued and generous friend Macmillan's first number of his Magazine, are all astonishing proofs of the brightness, accuracy, vivacity, unweariedness of his mind, and the endless sympathy and affectionate play of his affections with the full round of scientific truth. His essay on "Color Blindness" is, we believe, as perfect a monogram as exists, and will remain likely untouched and unadded to, _factum ad unguem_. As may be seen from these remarks, we regard him not so much as, like Edward Forbes, a great observer and quiet generalizer, or, like Samuel Brown, a discoverer and philosopher properly so called--though, as we have said, he had enough of these two men's prime qualities to understand and relish and admire them. His great quality lay in making men love ascertained and recorded truth, scientific truth especially; he made his reader and hearer _enjoy facts_. He illuminated the Book of Nature as they did the missals of old. His nature was so thoroughly composite, so in full harmony with itself, that no one faculty could or cared to act without calling in all the others to join in full chorus. To take an illustration from his own science, his faculties interpenetrated and interfused themselves into each other, as the gases do, by a law of their nature. Thus it was that everybody understood and liked and was impressed by him; he touched him at every point. Knowledge was to him no barren, cold essence; it was alive and flushed with the colors of the earth and sky, and all over with light and stars. His flowers--and his mind was full of flowers--were from seeds, and were sown by himself. They were neither taken from other gardens and stuck in rootless, as children do, much less were they of the nature of gumflowers, made with hands, wretched and dry and scentless. Truth of science was to him a body, full of loveliness, perfection, and strength, in which dwelt the unspeakable Eternal. This, which was the dominant idea of his mind--the goodliness, and not less the godliness of all science--made his whole life, his every action, every letter he wrote, every lecture he delivered, his last expiring breath, instinct with the one constant idea that all truth, all goodness, all science, all beauty, all gladness are but the expression of the mind and will and heart of the Great Supreme. And this, in his case, was not mysticism, neither was it merely a belief in revealed religion, though no man cherished and believed in his Bible more firmly and cordially than he; it was the assured belief, on purely scientific grounds, that God is indeed and in very truth all in all; that, to use the sublime adaptation by poor crazy Smart, the whole creation, visible and invisible, spiritual and material, everything that has being, is--to those who have ears to hear--forever declaring "_Thou Art_," before the throne of the Great I AM. To George Wilson, to all such men--and this is the great lesson of his life--the heavens are forever telling His glory, the firmament is forever showing forth His handiwork; day unto day, every day, is forever uttering speech, and night unto night is showing knowledge concerning Him. When he considered these heavens, as he lay awake weary and in pain, they were to him the work of His fingers. The moon, walking in brightness, and lying in white glory on his bed--the stars--were by Him ordained. He was a singularly happy, and happy-making man. No one since his boyhood could have suffered more from pain, and languor, and the misery of an unable body. Yet he was not only cheerful, he was gay, full of all sorts of _fun_--genuine fun--and his jokes and queer turns of thought and word were often worthy of Cowper or Charles Lamb. We wish we had them collected. Being, from his state of health and his knowledge of medicine, necessarily "mindful of death," having the possibility of his dying any day or any hour, always before him, and "that undiscovered country" lying full in his view, he must--taking, as he did, the right notion of the nature of things--have had a peculiar intensity of pleasure in the every-day beauties of the world.
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