However unfounded may be the system of vortices promulgated by Descartes, yet, as there is much of genius and fancy in it, the notion obtained great applause, and ranks among those theories which do honour to the moderns, or rather to the ancients, from whom it seems to have been drawn, notwithstanding its apparent novelty. In fact, Leucippus taught, and after him Democritus, that “the celestial bodies derived their formation and motion from an infinite number of atoms, of every sort of figure; which encountering one another, and clinging together, threw themselves into vortices; which being thoroughly agitated and circumvolved on all sides, the most subtile of those particles that went to the composition of the whole mass, made towards the utmost skirts of the circumferences of those vortices; whilst the less subtile, or those of a coarser element, subsided towards the centre, forming themselves into those spherical concretions, which compose the planets, the earth, and the sun.” They said, that “those vortices were actuated by the rapidity of a fluid matter, having the earth at the centre of it; and that the planets were moved, each of them, with more or less violence, in proportion to their respective distance from that centre.” They affirmed also, that the celerity with which those vortices moved, was occasionally the cause of their carrying off one another; the most powerful and rapid attracting, and drawing into itself, whatever was less so, whether planet or whatever else.
Leucippus seems also to have known that grand principle of Descartes, that “all revolving bodies endeavour to withdraw from their centre, and fly off in a tangent.”
RELIQUIÆ THOMSONIANA.
To the Editor.
Sir,—The [article] relating to Thomson, in a recent number of the Table Book, cannot fail to have deeply interested many of your readers, and in the hope that further similar communications may be elicited, I beg to offer the little I can contribute.
The biographical memoranda, the subject of the conversation in the article referred to, are said to have been transmitted to the earl of Buchan by Mr. Park. It is not singular that no part of it appears in his lordship’s “Essays on the Lives and Writings of Fletcher of Saltoun, and the Poet Thomson, 1792.” 8vo. Mr. Park’s communication was clearly too late for the noble author’s purpose. The conversation professes to have been in October, 1791; to my own knowledge the volume was finished and ready for publication late in the preceding September, although the date 1792 is affixed to the title.
Thomson, it is believed, first tuned his Doric reed in the porter’s lodge at Dryburgh, more recently the residence of David Stuart Erskine, earl of Buchan; hence the partiality which his lordship evinced for the memory of the poet. At p. 194 of the Essays are verses to Dr. De (la) Cour, in Ireland, on his Prospect of Poetry, which are there ascribed to Thomson, and admitted as such by Dr. Thomson, who directed the volume through the press; although it is certain that Thomson in his lifetime disavowed them. The verses to Dr. De la Cour appeared in the Daily Journal for November 1734; and Cave, the proprietor and editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, at the end of the poetical department in that miscellany for August, 1736, states himself “assured, from Mr. Thomson, that, though the verses to Dr. De la Cour have some lines from his Seasons, he knew nothing of the piece till he saw it in the Daily Journal.”
The appellation of the “oily man of God,” in the Essays, p. 258, was intended by the earl of Buchan for Dr. Murdoch, who was subsequently a biographer of Thomson. Such designations would puzzle a conjuror to elucidate, did not contemporary persons exist to afford a clue to them.
The recent number of the Table Book is not at hand, but from some MS. papers now before me,—James Robertson, surgeon to the household at Kew, who married the sister of Amanda, was the bosom friend of Thomson for more than twenty years. His conversation is said to have been facetious and intelligent, and his character exemplarily respectable. He died at his residence on Richmond Green after four days’ illness, 28th October, 1791, in his eighty-fourth year.