Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/36

 of Beaconsfield (1885), and Leo XII (1888). Others who sat to him were Canon Duckworth, Lord Shaftesbury Dr. Parker, Mr. Fawcett, Lord Napier of Magdala, Cobden, Lord Roberts, Dean Farrar, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, Sir Isaac Holden, Sir Edwin Landseer, and many leading academicians. Of his ideal work the best were The First Sacrifice,' 'The Lady of the Lake,' 'Pharaoh's Daughter, 'Zenobia,' and 'The Millennium.'

Acton's last work, which was left unfinished, was a small figure of 'The Ange of Peace.' He died at his wife's home Ormidale, Brodick, in the Isle of Arran which he visited every summer, on 28 Oct 1910.

Acton married on 15 Aug. 1875, at St. Mark's Church, Hamilton Terrace, London Marion Hamilton of the Isle of Arran, an authoress writing under the name 'Jeannie Hering.' He had four sons and three daughters. Two of his sons, Harold and Murray, practised their father's art.

 ADAMSON, ROBERT (1852–1902), philosopher, born at Edinburgh on 19 Jan. 1852, was fifth of the six children of Robert Adamson and Mary Agnes Buist. The father was a writer (i.e. solicitor) in Dunbar and afterwards at Coldstream, but had removed with his family to Edinburgh before the birth of his son Robert, and died when the latter was three years old. The boy passed from Daniel Stewart's Hospital, Edinburgh, to Edinburgh University in November 1866, and after obtaining first prizes in metaphysics and in English literature, graduated, in 1871, with first-class honours in philosophy and with a scholarship awarded to the best graduate in that subject. He spent the summer of 1871 at Heidelberg, and acted as assistant in the following winter to [q. v. Suppl. I], professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, and in 1872-4 to A. Campbell Fraser, professor of logic and metaphysics. During these years he read omnivorously in the Signet library and elsewhere, and gained other post-graduate scholarships or fellowships, including the Ferguson scholarship and the Shaw fellowship, both open to graduates of any Scottish university. In 1874 he was appointed additional examiner in philosophy in the university, and joined the editorial staff of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica' (9th edition). To the third and fourth volumes of that work he contributed a large number of articles on subjects of general literature, and in the third volume began a series of important philosophical articles. The article on (which  [q. v.] had originally undertaken and had relinquished) first gave public proof of Adamson's powers as a philosophical critic and historian. There followed biographies of Hume, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and the very learned article on Logic.

In the summer of 1876 Adamson was appointed professor of philosophy and political economy at Owens College, Manchester, in succession to [q. v.] After six years he was relieved of the work of lecturing in economics; but he greatly extended the philosophical teaching, especially after 1880, when the creation of the Victoria University gave him freedom to plan the work in accordance with his own views. He was made hon. LL.D. of Glasgow in 1883.

In 1893 he was appointed by the crown to the chair of logic in the university of Aberdeen. He removed to Glasgow in 1895 on his election to the professorship of logic and rhetoric there. Between 1885 and 1901 he acted on six occasions as examiner for the moral science tripos at Cambridge. For five years (1887-91) tie was one of the examiners in mental and moral science in the University of London. He was also the first external examiner in philosophy to the newly founded University of Wales (1896-9). On 5 Feb. 1902 died of enteric fever at Glasgow; his body was cremated at the Western Necropolis. In 1881 he married Margaret, daughter of David Duncan, a Manchester merchant, who survived him with two sons and four daughters.

Adamson took an active part in academic business. At Manchester he supported warmly the admission of women students to college and university on equal terms with men; he threw himself zealously into the movement for an independent university, and when the Victoria University was created in 1880 he took a prominent part in its organisation. He acted as temporary registrar, was first secretary and afterwards chairman of the new board of studies, and gave important assistance to the institution of the university department for training elementary teachers. At 