Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work

Abstract

THE life of James Croll is very remarkable. That a mason's son, who in youth laboured on the few acres of his father's homestead; who then, having a mind disposed to mechanics, became apprentice to millwright; who, having served his four years' time, got employment at eight shillings a week, having sometimes to walk thirty or forty miles a day to his work, and to sleep in the barn; who, not becoming inured to such hardships, turned carpenter, and met with some measure of success, till disease in the elbow set in; who then, not having sufficient education for a clerkship, found employment in the tea trade, and was after a time helped by his employer to open a shop for his own profit—in which venture he might have succeeded, even in spite of reading “Edwards on the Will,” had not the elbow caused a long and painful illness which ruined the business, and left him with an ossified joint; who then supported himself for a twelvemonth by making electrical instruments wherewith the neighbours might cure themselves of all the ills the flesh was heir to; who, when the demand for the panacea was exhausted, “after due consideration,” set up a temperance hotel in a town, Blairgowrie, of 3500 inhabitants, with sixteen inns and public-houses there already, and far from any railway; who, after a year and a half of failure as innkeeper, took to canvassing for various insurance companies, where, as usual, everything went contrariwise with him—that a man, who thus spent nearly the first forty years of his life, should have become so successful a student of metaphysics as to write a work of decided merit on “The Philosophy of Theism,” is perhaps not a matter of surprise, seeing that he was a Scotchman. But we may surely indulge our faculty of wonder when we learn that a London publisher was found ready to undertake the whole risk of publishing his work, by an unknown Scotch tradesman or agent, on the terms of half profits, and that the result justified the publisher's enterprise.

Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work.

By J. C. Irons. Pp. 553. (London: Stanford, 1896.)