Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/558

542 he was not appreciated as he deserved. But honouns came thick upon him. On the Continent he was spoken of as greater than Harvey. It is narrated that one day Roux, a celebrated French physiologist, dismissed his class without a lecture, saying &quot; C est assez, Messieurs, vous avez vu Charles Bell.&quot; He held the Edinburgh chair from 1836 to 1842. During his professorship, in 1838, he published the Institutes of Surgery, arranged in tlie order of the Lectures delivered in tlie University of Edinburgh ; and in 1841 he wrote a volume of Practical Essays, two of which &quot; On Squinting,&quot; and &quot;On the Action of Purgatives,&quot; are of great value. Sir Charles Bell died at Hallow Park near Worcester on Thursday, 28th April 1842, in his sixty-eighth year; and he lies under the yew tree in the peaceful churchyard of Hallow. His epitaph, written by his life-long friend Lord Jeffrey, summarizes his character as follows : &quot; Sacred to the memory of Sir Charles Bell, who, after unfolding, with unrivalled sagacity, patience, and success, the wonderful structure of our mortal bodies, esteemed lightly of his greatest discoveries, except only as they teuded to impress himself and others with a deeper sense of the infinite wisdom and ineffable goodness of the Almighty Creator. He was born at Edinburgh 1774; died, while on a visit of friendship, at Hallow park, in this parish, 1842 ; and lies buried in the adjoining churchyard.&quot;  BELL,, brother of the preceding, was Bell. born at Edinburgh on the 20th of March 1770. At the age of eight he entered the High School, but he received no university education further than attending Tytler s lectures on civil history, Stewart s course of moral philosophy, and Hume s lectures on the law of Scotland. He became a member of the Faculty of Advocates in 1791, and was one of the earliest and most attached friends of Francis Jeffrey. In 1804 he published a Treatise on the Law of Bankruptcy in Scotland, in 2 vols. 8vo, which was gradually enlarged in subsequent editions, till at length a fifth edition was pub lished in 1826, in 2 vols. 4to, under the title of Commen taries on the Law of Scotland and on t/ie Principles of Mercantile Jurisprudence an institutional work of the very highest excellence, which has guided the judicial delibera tions of his own country till the present time, and has had its value acknowledged by such eminent jurists as Story and Kent. In 1821 he was unanimously elected professor of the law of Scotland in the University of Edin burgh ; and in 1831 he was appointed to one of the prin cipal clerkships in the Supreme Court. He was in 1833 placed at the head of a commission to inquire into the expediency of making various improvements in the Scottish bankruptcy law ; and in consequence of the reports of the commissioners, chiefly drawn up by himself, many beneficial alterations have been made in this department of the law. He died on the 23d September 1843. A seventh edition of the Commentaries, edited by J. Maclaren, advocate, appeared in 1870. Bell s smaller treatise, Principles of the Law of Scotland (6th edit. 1872), has long been a standard text-book for law students. The Illustrations of the Principles is also a work of high value.  BELL,, a mechanical engineer, well known for his successful application of steam-power to the propulsion of ships, was born at Torphichen, in Linlithgowshire, in 1767. Having received the ordinary education of a parish school, he was apprenticed to his uncle, a millwright, and, after qualifying himself as a ship-modeller at Bo ness, went to London, where he found employment under Rennie, the celebrated engineer. Returning to Scotland in 1790, he first settled as a carpenter at Glasgow and afterwards removed to Helensburgh, on the Firth of Clyde, where his wife superintended a large inn, together with the public baths, while he pursued his mechanical projects, and also found occasional employment as an engineer. It was not until January 1812 that he gave a practical solution of the difficulties which had beset all previous experimenters, by producing a steamboat (which he named the &quot; Comet,&quot;) of about 25 tons, propelled by an engine of three horse power, at a speed of seven miles an hour. Although the honour of priority, by about four years, is admitted to belong to Robert Fulton, an American engineer, there appears to be no doubt that Fulton had received very material assistance in the construction of his vessel from Bell and others in this country. A handsome sum was raised for Bell by subscription among the citizens of Glasgow ; and he also received from the trustees of the River Clyde a pension of 100 a year. He died at Helensburgh, 14th November 1830, and a monument was erected to his memory at Dunglass, near Bowling, on the banks of the Clyde.  BELL,, was born at Glasgow in II. 1805, and received his education at the High School of that city. He afterwards studied at Edinburgh and became intimate with Moir, Hogg, Wilson, and others of the bril liant staff of Blackwood s Magazine, to which he was drawn by his political sympathies. In 1828 he became editor of the Edinburgh Literary Journal, which proved unsuccessful. He passed to the bar in 1832. In 1836 he competed unsuccessfully against Sir William Hamilton for the chair of logic and metaphysics in Edinburgh University, and three years afterwards was appointed sheriff-substitute of Lanarkshire, an office which he held until 1867, when he succeeded Sir Archibald Alison in the post of sheriff-prin cipal of the county. During his early life he had been a versatile author of poems and prose sketches, but his literary activity was checked after he applied himself seriously to law. In 1831 he published Summer and Winter Hours, a volume of poems, of which the best known is that on Mary Queen of Scots. He further defended the cause of the unfortunate queen in a prose Life. A preface which he wrote to the works of Shakespeare contains some acute and original criticism. His Romances and other Poems (1866) display deeper thought and less fervour than his former works, but are mainly interesting as evidence of latent poetic genius, the development of which was pre vented by attention to other pursuits. Bell s literary tastes did not affect his industry in his profession, and, on the other hand, his legal labours never dulled his early affection for poetry and painting. He deserves to be held in kindly remembrance for his readiness to assist youthful literary aspirants. During many years he took an active interest in social questions, especially in promoting educational and sanitary reforms. He died in January lt&amp;gt;74.  BELL,, of Antermony, a Scottish traveller in the Jol first half of the last century, was born in 1691, and edu cated for the medical profession, in which he took the degree of M.D. In 1714 he set out for St Petersburg, where, through the introduction of a countryman, he was nominated medical attendant to Valensky, recently ap pointed to the Persian embassy, with whom he travelled from 1715 to 1718. The next four years he spent in an embassy to China, passing though Siberia and the great Tatar deserts. He had scarcely rested from this last journey when he was summoned to attend Peter the Great in his perilous expedition to Derbend and the Caspian Gates. The narrative of this journey he has enriched with interesting particulars of the public and private life of that remarkable prince. In 1738 he was sent by the Russian Government on a mission to Constantinople, to which, accompanied by a single attendant who spoke Turkish, he proceeded, in the midst of winter and all the horrors of a barbarous warfare, returning in May to St Petersburg. It appears that after this he was for several years estab lished as a merchant at Constantinople, where he married 