Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/569

 S T E S T E 545 ever puzzling might be the difficulties into which it led them. Stevens, on the contrary, insisted that armed resistance to the constitution had the effect of suspending the constitution within the area of the resistance ; that the success of the resistance would show whether the suspen- sion was to be temporary or permanent ; and that, in the meantime, those who resisted the constitution were entitled to no rights under it, in fact, to no rights except those reserved under the laws of war. This was too radical even for the war party ; but, at the end of the war, Stevens's pronounced ability gave him the leadership of the house committee on reconstruction. Even in this position, he never obtained a formal endorsement of his theory ; but the practical management of reconstruction shows its strong influence in many features otherwise inexplicable. He lived to take a leading part in the unsuccessful impeachment of President Johnson, and to see the admis- sion of the first instalment of reconstructed States, and died at Washington, August 11, 1868. Stevens's life has been written from a friendly and from a hostile point of view, the former in the volume entitled Thaddeus Stevens, Commoner, the latter in Harris's Political Conflict in America. STEVENSON, ROBERT (1772-1850), civil engineer, was the only son of Alan Stevenson, partner in a West Indian house in Glasgow, and was born in that city 8th June 1772. Having lost his father in infancy, he removed with his mother to Edinburgh. In his youth he assisted his step- father, Thomas Smith, in his lighthouse schemes, and at the early age of nineteen was sent to superintend the erection of a lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbrae. During successive winters he attended classes at Anderson's College, Glasgow, and at Edinburgh university. He suc- ceeded his stepfather, whose daughter he married in 1799, as engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and at the same time began general practice as a civil engineer. During his period of office from 1797 to 1843, he designed and executed no fewer than eighteen lighthouses, the most important being that on the Bell Rock, begun in 1807 and completed in 1810, in which he improved considerably on the designs of Smeaton for the Eddystone lighthouse (see LIGHTHOUSE, vol. xiv. p. 616). For its illumination he introduced an improved apparatus ; he was also the author of various other valuable inventions in connexion with lighting, including the intermittent and flashing lights, and the mast lantern for ships. In his general practice as a civil engineer he was employed in the construction of many county roads, in various important improvements in connexion with the approaches to Edinburgh, including that by the Calton Hill, in the erection of slips at ferries, in the construction of harbours, docks, and breakwaters, in the improvement of river and canal navigation, and in the construction of several important bridges. It was he that brought into notice the superiority of malleable iron rods for railways over the old cast iron, and he was the inventor of the movable jib and balance cranes. It was chiefly through his interposition that an Admiralty survey was established, from which the Admiralty sailing direc- tions for the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland have been prepared. Stevenson was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1815, and afterwards became a member of the Geological and Astronomical Societies of London and the Wernerian and Antiquarian Societies of Scotland. He published an account of the Bell Rock lighthouse in 1824, and, besides contributing important articles on engineering subjects to Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica, was the author of various papers read before the societies he was connected with. He died at Edinburgh 12th July 1850. A Life of Robert Stevenson, by his son David Stevenson, appeared in 1878. David Stevenson (1815-86), who along with his brother Alan succeeded to his father's business, was the author of a Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America (1838, re- published in " Weale's Series," 1859), Marine Surveying (1842), Canal and River Engineering (1858; 2d ed. enlarged, 1872; 3d ed. 1886), and of various papers read before learned societies. STEVINUS, SIMON (1548-1620). This great mathe- matician was born in 1548 at Bruges (where the Place Simon Stevin contains his statue by Eugen Simonis) and died in 1620 at The Hague or in Leyden. Of the circum- stances of his life very little is recorded ; the exact day of his birth and the day and place of his death are alike uncertain. It is known that he left a widow with two children ; and one or two hints scattered throughout his works inform us that he began life as a merchant's clerk in Antwerp, that he travelled in Poland, Denmark, and other parts of northern Europe, and that he was intimate with Prince Maurice of Orange, who asked his advice on many occasions, and made him a public officer, at first director of the so-called " waterstaet," and afterwards quartermaster-general. The question whether Stevinus, like most of the rest of the prince's followers, belonged to the Protestant creed hardly admits of a categorical answer. A Catholic, it may be said, would never in those times have risen to so high a position. A Catholic would per- haps not have been so ready as Stevinus to deny the value of all authority, whether of an Aristotle, of an Euclid, or of a Vitruvius. A Catholic could not well have boasted, as Stevinus in a political pamphlet did, that he had always been in harmony with the executive power. But against these considerations it might be urged that a Protestant had no occasion to boast of a harmony most natural to him, while his further remark, in the same pamphlet, to the effect that a state church is indispensable, and that those who cannot belong to it on conscientious grounds ought to leave the country rather than show any opposition to its rites, seems rather to indicate the crypto-Catholic, who wishes for reasons of his own to remain in the Netherlands. The same conclusion is supported by the ascertained fact that Stevinus, a year before his death, bequeathed a pious legacy to the church of Westkerke in Flanders, out of the revenues of which masses were to be said. But, however it may be answered, the question is fortunately of little importance to us, as Stevinus was neither a political personage nor did he engage in religious controversy. He was mainly, as already said, a great mathematician, and it is chiefly in this quality that we must try to get acquainted with him. His claims to fame are most varied. Some of them appealed strongly to the men of his time, but many were such as could not well be understood by most of his contemporaries, and have found due acknowledgment only in later times. His contemporaries were most struck by his invention of a carriage with sails, a little model of which was pre- served at Scheveningen till 1802. The carriage itself had been lost long before ; but we know that about the year 1600 Stevinus, with Prince Maurice of Orange and twenty- six others, made use of it on the sea-shore between Scheven- ingen and Petten, that it was propelled solely by the force of the wind, and that it acquired a speed which exceeded that of horses. Another idea of Stevinus, for which even Grotius gave him great credit, was his notion of a bygone age of wisdom. Mankind once knew everything knovvabJe, but gradually forgot most of it, till a time came when little by little the forgotten knowledge was reacquired; the goal to be aimed at is the bringing about of a second age of wisdom, in which mankind shall have recovered all its early knowledge. The fellow-countrymen of Stevinus were proud that he wrote in their own dialect, which he thought fitted for a universal language, as no other abounded like Dutch in monosyllabic radical words. History has been much less enthusiastic than his con- XXII. 69