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 right arm. With unflinching pertinacity he struggled till he had completed a likeness of the king upon which he was engaged at the time, and then started for his beloved Italy, leaving behind him a series of fifty royal portraits to be completed by his assistant Reinagle. For several years he lingered in the south, his constitution finally broken. He died at Dover on the 10th of August 1784.

Among his most satisfactory productions are some of his earlier ones, such as the full-length of the duke of Argyll, and the numerous bust-portraits of Scottish gentlemen and their ladies which he executed before settling in London. They are full of both grace and individuality; the features show excellent draughtsmanship; and the flesh-painting is firm and sound in method, though frequently tending a little to hardness and opacity. His full-length of Lady Mary Coke is remarkable for the skill and delicacy with which the white satin drapery is managed; while in the portrait of his brown-eyed wife, the eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick, in the Scottish National Gallery, we have a sweetness and tenderness which shows the painter at his highest. This last-named work shows the influence of French art, an influence which helped greatly to form the practice of Ramsay, and which is even more clearly visible in the large collection of his sketches in the possession of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Board of Trustees, Edinburgh.

 RAMSEY [sic], SIR ANDREW CROMBIE (1814–1891), British geologist, was born at Glasgow on the 31st of January 1814, being the son of William Ramsay, manufacturing chemist. He was for a time actually engaged in business, but from spending his holidays in Arran he became interested in the study of the rocks of that island, and was thus led to acquire the rudiments of geology. A geological model of Arran, made by him on the scale of two inches to the mile, was exhibited at the meeting of the British Association at Glasgow in 1840, and attracted the notice of Sir R. I. Murchison, with the result that he received from De la Beche an appointment on the Geological Survey, on which he served for forty years, from 1841 to 1881. He was first stationed at Tenby, and to that circumstance may be attributed the fact that so much of his geological work dealt with Wales. His first book, The Geology of the Isle of Arran, was published in 1841. In 1845 he became local director for Great Britain, but he continued to carry on a certain amount of field-work until 1854. To the first volume of the Memoirs of the Geological Survey (1846) he contributed a now classic essay, “On the Denudation of South Wales and the Adjacent Counties of England,” in which he advocated the power of the sea to form great plains of denudation, although at the time he underestimated the influence of subaerial agents in sculpturing the scenery. In 1866 he published The Geology of North Wales (vol. iii. of the Memoirs), of which a second edition was published in 1881. He was chosen professor of geology at University College, London, in 1848, and afterwards lecturer in the same subject at the School of Mines in 1851. Eleven years later he was elected to the presidential chair of the Geological Society, and in 1872 he succeeded Murchison as director-general of the Geological Survey. In 1880 he acted as president of the British Association at Swansea, and in the following year retired from the public service, receiving at the same time the honour of knighthood. In 1860 he published a little book entitled The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales. The study of this subject led him to discuss the Glacial Origin of Certain Lakes in Switzerland, the Black Forest, &c. He dealt also with the origin of The Red Rocks of England (1871) and The River Courses of England and Wales (1872). He was especially interested in tracing out the causes which have determined the physical configuration of a district, and he devoted much attention to the effects produced by ice, his name being identified with the hypothesis, which, however, has never commanded general assent, that in some cases lake basins have been scooped out by glaciers. A master in the broader questions of stratigraphy and physical geology, he was a clear exponent of facts, but rather impatient of details, while his original and often bold theories, expressed both in lectures and in writings, stirred others with enthusiasm and undoubtedly exercised great influence on the progress of geology. His lectures to working men, given in 1863 in the Museum of Practical Geology, formed the nucleus of his famous Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain (5th ed., 1878; 6th ed., by H. B. Woodward, 1894). He received a Royal medal in 1880 from the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1862; he was also the recipient of the Neill prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1866, and of the Wollaston medal of the Geological Society of London in 1871. He died at Beaumaris on the 9th of December 1891.

 RAMSAY, ANDREW MICHAEL (1686–1743), French writer, of Scottish birth, commonly called the “Chevalier Ramsay,” was born at Ayr on the 9th of January 1686. Ramsay served with the English auxiliaries in the Netherlands, and in 1710 visited Fénelon, who converted him to Roman Catholicism. He remained in France until 1724, when he was sent to Rome as tutor to the Stuart princes, Charles Edward and Henry, the future cardinal of York. He was driven by intrigue from this post, and returned to Paris. He was in England in 1730, and received an honorary degree from the university of Oxford. The claim was nominally his discipleship to Fénelon, but in reality beyond doubt his connexion with the Jacobite party. He died at St Germain-en-Laye (Seine-et-Oise) on the 6th of May 1743. Ramsay’s principal work was Les voyages de Cyrus (London, 1728; Paris, 1727), a book composed in avowed imitation of Télémaque. He also edited Télémaque itself (Paris, 2 vols., 1717) with an introduction, and wrote a Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Fénelon (The Hague, 1723), besides a partial biography (Paris, 1735) of Turenne, some poems (Edinburgh, 1728) in English, and other miscellaneous works.  RAMSAY, DAVID (1749–1815), American physician and historian, the son of an Irish emigrant, was born in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, on the 2nd of April 1749. He graduated at Princeton in 1765, and M.B. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1773, and then settled as a physician at Charleston, South Carolina, where he had a large practice. During the War of Independence he served as a field-surgeon (1780–1781), and from 1776 to 1783 he was a member of the South Carolina legislature. Having acted as one of the “council of safety” at Charleston, he was, on the capture of that city in 1786, seized by the British as a hostage, and for nearly a year was kept in confinement at St Augustine. From 1782 to 1786 he served in the Continental Congress, and from 1801 to 1815 in the state Senate, of which he was long president. In 1785 he published in two volumes History of the Revolution of South Carolina, in 1789 in two volumes History of the American Revolution, in 1807 a Life of Washington, and in 1809 in two volumes a History of South Carolina. He was also the author of several minor works. He died at Charleston on the 8th of May 1815 from a wound inflicted by a lunatic. His History of the United States in 3 vols. was published posthumously in 1816–1817, and forms the first three volumes of his Universal History Americanized, published in 12 vols. in 1819.  RAMSAY, ROBERT (1842–1882), Australian statesman, was a native of Hawick, Roxburghshire, but his parents emigrated to Victoria when he was a child of four, and he was educated at the Scottish college in Melbourne. He studied law at Melbourne University, and subsequently became a member of a well-known firm of solicitors in the city. He married in 1868 Isabella Catherine Urquhart, and in 1870 entered the assembly for East Bourke in the Conservative and free trade interest. He was a member of the government of James Goodall Francis in 1872–74. He was subsequently postmaster-general (1874–75) in the administration of George Biscoe Kerferd; he held the same office in conjunction with the ministry of education (1875–77) under Sir James M‘Culloch; and for a short term in 1880 he was chief secretary and minister of education in the first administration of James Service. He died on the 23rd of May 1882.