Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/134

 papers read at the meetings of the Royal Society and the Royal Institution of London. In 1831 he went to America, visiting Niagara and the Canadas, New York, New Orleans, Tampico, and Mexico. He visited the Pyramids of Choluteca and took their measurement. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1832 he settled down for a time to the study of Egyptology. On 13 July 1833 he delivered an address on embalming at the Royal Institution, when he unrolled a mummy in the presence of a deeply interested audience (Athenæum, 1833, pp. 481–3). His craving for travel was, however, irresistible. He undertook to head an African expedition, of which he defrayed the whole expense himself, and proposed to proceed by way of Fez to Tâfilêlt, and thence, after examining the southern slope of Mount Atlas, to Nigritia, across the Sahara. He quitted England in August 1835, bound for Timbuctoo. Going to Gibraltar he crossed the straits into Morocco, and there his medical knowledge was so highly appreciated by the sultan and his officials that he obtained with great difficulty permission to depart. In a letter to his brother he states that no less than twelve hundred patients passed through his hands while in Morocco. When leaving he was obliged to plead that his stock of medicine was exhausted, and at his request a medicine-chest was forwarded to the sultan from England. He started for the great desert at the end of November 1836, but while stopping at a watering-place called Swekeza he was robbed and murdered on 18 Dec. 1836 by the tribe El Harib, who, it is supposed, were bribed by the merchants of Tâfilêlt, and had left their usual haunts with the set purpose of seizing the traveller and his goods. He had inured himself to great bodily privation, and acquired the power of resisting the action of the sun, his ‘face, hands, arms, feet, and legs having been three times excoriated.’ After Davidson's death his brother printed privately a book of pathetic interest entitled ‘Notes taken during Travels in Africa,’ 1839, 4to, printed by J. L. Cox. The account of unrolling the mummy at the Royal Institution in 1833 was also published in pamphlet form. Many of his letters from Africa were addressed to the Duke of Sussex (Geog. Soc. Journ. vii. 151).

[Martin's Catalogue of Privately Printed Books (2nd ed.), 483; Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vi. 430, vii. 144; Athenæum, 1833 and 1837.] 

DAVIDSON, THOMAS, D.D. (1747–1827), theologian, was born in 1747 at Inchture, Perthshire, where his father, Thomas Randall, was minister. He took the name of Davidson on succeeding to the estate of Muirhouse, near Edinburgh, which had belonged to an uncle. He was educated at Glasgow and at Leyden, where his attention was more particularly directed to biblical criticism. In 1771 he succeeded his father at Inchture; in 1773 he was translated to the outer high church of Glasgow, and from that to Lady Yester's church, and in 1785 to the Tolbooth church, both in Edinburgh.

Davidson did not make any important contribution to theology, but exercised a powerful influence on the community of Edinburgh and the church of Scotland, through the singular elevation of his character, his great diligence in pastoral work, his lively interest in charitable and religious objects, and liberal contributions towards them, and his very special interest in students, especially those of slender means. The writer of his life in Kay's ‘Portraits’ says of him: ‘He was a sound, practical, and zealous preacher; and much as he was esteemed in the pulpit, was no less respected by his congregation and all who knew him for those domestic and private excellences which so much endear their possessor to society. To all the public charities he contributed largely, and was generally among the first to stimulate by his example. … In religious matters, and in the courts connected with the church, he took a sincere interest, but was by no means inclined to push himself before the public. … Only three of his sermons were published, and these were delivered on public occasions.’

Some idea of the impression made by Davidson on his contemporaries may be formed from the singular reverence with which he was spoken of in after years by many who had known him, or heard much of him, in their youth. The late Dr. Guthrie, by way of enforcing the importance of good social manners, as well as higher qualifications, for the ministerial office, used to tell how this holy man would sometimes give an awkward student a guinea to attend a dancing school ‘to teach the lads, as he expressed it, to enter a room properly.’ Dr. Chalmers, in one of his greatest speeches in the general assembly of 1840, had occasion to speak of ‘that venerable christian patriarch, Dr. Davidson of Edinburgh, whose heavenward aspirations, whose very looks of love and grace celestial, apart from language altogether, bespoke the presence of a man who felt himself at the gates of his blissful and everlasting home.’ In Lockhart's ‘Life of Sir Walter Scott’ (i. 108) it is mentioned (in Mr. Mitchell's ‘Recollections’) that the poet's mother, in the absence of Dr. Er-