Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/164

Rh 146 M A C M A C in Edinburgh, to the Magazine of Botany and Zoology, and to the Transactions of the British Association. He also assisted Audubon in his classical works on the Birds of America; and he edited Withering s British Botany. His larger works are numerous, and include biographies (of Humboldt, and of zoologists from Aristotle to Linnaeus), Text-books of Botany, of Geology, and of Conchology, a History of British Quadrupeds, a History of the Mollusca of Aberdeen, Banff, and Kincardine, a Manual of British Ornithology, and a History of British Birds, in 5 vols., 1837-52, The last work holds a high rank from the excellent descriptions of the structure, habits, and haunts of birds, and from the use in classification of characters afforded by their internal organs. In 1850 he spent some time in the Highlands of Aberdeenshire. The results are embodied in the Natural History of Deeside, published after his death by command of the queen. He made considerable collections, alike for the instruc tion of his students and to illustrate the zoology, botany, and geology of the parts of Scotland examined by him, especially around Aberdeen. His success in enlisting the interest and co-operation of his students is shown by the assistance acknowledged by him in his work on the mollusca of that district. His devotion to his favourite sciences made him apt to be careless of risk to health, and seems to have led to the illness that proved fatal. Though his reputation rests chiefly on his works on birds and on mollusca, his other writings are also of interest and value. In some respects he was in advance of most of his con temporaries, e.g., in the opinions in regard to species published in his Text-book of Botany (pp. 210, 211) in 1840. His reputation might have been greater as a specialist had he restricted his investigations within narrower limits, but this he was prevented from doing as much by the wide range of subjects that he had to teach as by his natural inclination. He had to encounter great difficulties in ascertaining what had been already accomplished by naturalists elsewhere from the want of a good lib rary and of named collections for reference. To this fact may be traced a tendency to regard as undescribed and to name whatever animals he was unable to identify from books within his reach, as well as occasional apparent neglect of work done by others and some peculiar views on nomenclature and classification. Throughout his life pecuniary difficulties, in part arising from the publication of his books, pressed on him ; and to this it was probably due, at least in part, that, despite an amiable nature, he at times expressed himself in controversy in a way that made him keen opponents. His books show that from all troubles he found relief in tracing the proofs of wisdom and of goodness in nature. Throughout his was a laborious life, and just before his death he completed his History of British Birds, an enduring and worthy memorial of an earnest and true-hearted naturalist. His family inherited a taste for similar pursuits. One son, John, contributed several articles to magazines on the natural history of Scotland, and published an account of the voyage round the world of H.M.S. &quot;Rattlesnake,&quot; on board which he was naturalist. Another son, Paul, published an Aberdeen Flora in 1853. MACHIAVELLI, NiccoL6 (1469-1527), was born at Florence on the 3d of May 1469. His ancestry claimed blood relationship with the lords of Montespertoli, a fief situated between Val di Pesa and Val d Elsa, at no great distance from the city. In 1393 the castle of Montespertoli became the property of Niccolo s great-grandfather. At this date the Machiavelli, like other nobles of the Florentine contado, had been absorbed into the body of the burghers, and had begun to seek distinction as officers of the republic. They counted numerous priors and gonfaloniers of justice in the generations which preceded the illustrious secretary. Niccol6 s father, Bernardo, who was born in 1428, followed the profession of a jurist. He held landed property, chiefly near the village of San Casciano, which was worth, according to a recent calculation, something like 250 a year of our money. His son, though not wealthy, was never wholly dependent upon official income. Of Niccolo s early years and education little is known. He is said to have studied under the grammarian Marcello Virgilio Adrian! ; and his works show wide reading in the Latin and Italian classics. But it is almost certain that he had not mastered the Greek language. In that age of humanistic erudition, it is noticeable that the three most eminent writers of the Renaissance Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Guicciardini owed their training to the literature of their own nation. To the defects of Machiavelli s educa tion, as it appeared to men of Giovio s stamp, we may, in part at least, ascribe the peculiar vigour of his style and his speculative originality. He is free from the scholastic trifling and learned frivolity which tainted the rhetorical culture of his century. He made the world of men and things his study, learned to write his mother- tongue with idiomatic conciseness, and nourished his imagination on the masterpieces of the Romans. Machia velli shared the enthusiasm of his race and period for antiquity ; but the antiquity he worshipped was confined to the commonwealth of Rome. Not the arts, the letters, and the philosophy of the Greeks, but the Latin histories in which the statecraft and organization of the Romans are described, arrested his attention. His habit of thought is marked throughout by a strong Latin bias. The year 1494, the year of Charles VIII. s invasion and of the Medici s expulsion from Florence, saw Machiavelli s first entrance into public life. He was appointed clerk in the second chancery of the commune under his old master Marcello Virgilio Adriani. Early in 1498 Adriani became chancellor of the republic, and Machiavelli received his vacated office with the rank of second chancellor and secre tary. This post he retained till the year 1512. The masters he had to serve were the Dieci di Liberia e Pace, who, though subordinate to the signoria, exercised a sepa rate control over the departments of war and the interior. They sent their own ambassadors to foreign powers, trans acted business with the cities of the Florentine domain, and controlled the military establishment of the commonwealth. The next fourteen years of Machiavelli s life were fully occupied in the voluminous correspondence of his bureau, in diplomatic missions of varying importance, and in the organization of a Florentine militia. It would be tedious and uuinstructive to follow him through all his embassies to petty courts of Italy, the first of which took place in 1499, when he was sent to negotiate the continuance of a loan to Catherine Sforza, countess of Forli and Imola. A more important mission followed in 1500, when Machiavelli travelled into France, to deal with Louis XII. about the affairs of Pisa. It is enough to say in general that these embassies were the school in which Machiavelli formed his political opinions, and gathered views regarding the state of Europe and the relative strength of nations. They not only introduced him to the subtleties of Italian diplomacy, but also extended his observation over races very different from the Italians in their social and consti tutional development. He thus, in the course of his official business, gradually acquired principles and settled ways of thinking which he afterwards expressed in writing. He was at no time a philosopher or man of letters by profession, and when he came to write he gave to the world the con densed result of practical experience, combined with medi tations on the Latin historians, rather than a methodical system. His office obliged him from time to time to draw up proposals and memorials on questions of the day, which he presented to the Dieci. One of these, on the affairs of Pisa, belongs to 1499; a second, on the condition of Pistoia, to 1501 ; a third, of more general importance, on the right way of dealing with the rebels of Valdichiana, to 1502. In this last-named document some of the points of