Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/98

302 The last beautiful allusion is to the unfinished tale of Emmeline, which was published by her husband, Dr. Brunton (now professor of Oriental Languages in the university of Edinburgh), along with a brief, but most elegant and touching memoir of her life.

BRYCE, (the Rev.) ALEXANDER, an eminent geometrician, was born in the year 1713, at Boarland in the parish of Kincardine, and received the first rudiments of learning at the school of Downe, Perthshire. He studied afterwards at the university of Edinburgh, where his proficiency in mathematics and practical astronomy, early attracted the notice and secured for him the patronage of professor Maclaurin. At the particular request of that celebrated man, he went to Caithness, in May, 1740, as tutor to a gentleman's son, but chiefly to construct a map of the northern coast ; the number of shipwrecks rendering this, at the time, an object of considerable national importance. During a residence of three years, and in defiance of many threats from the peasantry, (which made it necessary for him to go always armed,) who did not relish so accurate an examination of their coast, from motives of disloyalty, or because they were afraid it would deprive them of two principal sources of income smuggling and plunder from the shipwrecks, he accomplished, at his own expense, the geometrical survey, and furnished " A Map of the north coast of Britain, from Raw Stoir of Assynt, to Wick, in Caithness, with the harbours and rocks, and an account of the tides in the Pentland Firth." This map was afterwards published by the philosophical, now the Royal, Society of Edinburgh in 1744. Mr. Arrowsmith, it may be mentioned, has lately pronounced it to be