Page images
PDF
EPUB

as he says, of drawing pictures, in which he never strove to excel, he resolved to go to London, in the hope of finding employment as a teacher of mechanics and astronomy. Having written out a proof of a new astronomical truth which had occurred to him, namely, that the moon must move always in a path concave to the sun, he shewed his proposition and its demonstration to Mr. Folkes, the President of the Royal Society, who thereupon took him the same evening to the meeting of that learned body. This had the effect of bringing him immediately into notice. He soon after published his first work, 'A Dissertation on the Phenomena of the Harvest Moon,' with the description of a new Orrery, having only four wheels. Of this work he says, with his characteristic modesty, "Having never had a grammatical education, nor time to study the rules of just composition, I acknowledge that I was afraid to put it to the press; and for the same cause, I ought to have the same fears still." It was, however, well received by the public; and its ingenious author afterwards followed it up by various other productions, most of which became very popular. In 1748 he began to give public lectures on his favourite subjects, which were numerously and fashionably attended, his late Majesty George III., who was then a boy, being occasionally among his auditors He had till now continued to work at his old profession of a portrait painter; but about this time he at last bade it a final farewell, having secured another, and, in his estimation, a much more agreeable means of providing a subsistence for himself and his family. Soon after the accession of George III., a pension of fifty pounds per annum was bestowed upon him from the privy purse. In 1763 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; the usual fees being remitted, as had been done in the cases of Newton and Thomas

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small]

Simpson. He died in 1776, having for many years enjoyed a distinguished reputation both at home and abroad; for several of his works had been translated into foreign languages, and were admired throughout Europe for the simplicity and ingenuity of their elucidations. Of his Dialogues on Astronomy, Madame de Genlis says, "This book is written with so much

clearness, that a child of ten years old may understand it perfectly from one end to the other."

The faculties of distinct apprehension and luminous exposition belonged, indeed, to Ferguson in a pre-eminent degree. He doubtless owed his superiority here in a great measure to the peculiar manner in which he had been obliged to acquire his knowledge. Nothing that he had learned had been set him as a task. He had applied himself to whatever subject of study engaged his attention, simply from the desire and with the view of understanding it. All that he knew, therefore, he knew thoroughly, and not by rote merely, as many things are learned by those who have no higher object than to master the task of the day. On the other hand, as has often happened in the case of self-educated men, the want of a regular director of his studies had left him ignorant of many departments of knowledge in which, had he been introduced to them, he was probably admirably adapted to distinguish himself, and from which he might have drawn, at all events, the most valuable assistance in the prosecution of his favourite investigations. Thus, familiar as he was with the phenomena of astronomy and the practical parts of mechanics, and admirable as was his ingenuity in mechanical invention, he knew nothing, or next to nothing, either of abstract mathematics or of the higher parts of algebra. He remained, in this way, to the end of his life, rather a clever empiric, to use the term in its original

and more honourable signification, as meaning a practical and experimenting philosopher, than a man of science. This was more peculiarly the sort of peril to which self-educated men were exposed in Ferguson's day, when books of any kind were comparatively scarce, and good elementary works scarcely existed on any subject. Much has since been done, and is now doing, to supply that great desideratum; and even already, in many departments, the man who can merely read is provided with the means of instructing himself both at little expense, and with a facility and completeness such as a century, or even half a century ago, were altogether out of the question. Not a little, however, still remains to be accomplished before the good work can be considered as finished; nor, indeed, is it the nature of it ever to be finished, seeing that, even if we should have perfectly arranged and systematized all our present knowledge, time must be constantly adding to our possessions here, and opening new worlds for philosophy to explore and conquer.

It was, as has been stated, the accident of the roof of his father's cottage coming down, while he was a child, that first turned Ferguson's attention to mechanical contrivance. Such are the chances which often develope genius, and probably even give it in part its direction and peculiar character. The late eminent engineer, JOHN RENNIE, used to trace his first notions in regard to the powers of machinery, to his having been obliged, when a boy, in consequence of the breaking down of a bridge, to go one winter every morning to school by a circuitous road, which carried him past a place where a thrashing machine was generally at work. Perhaps, had it not been for this casualty, he might have adopted another profession than the one in which he so much distinguished himself. It was the appearance of

« PreviousContinue »