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WIL Jerusalem, which he reached on the 27th of February. From Jerusalem he visited the Dead Sea, and in April set out from the holy city, homewards, through Egypt. In Alexandria he complained of illness. On the 21st of May he embarked on board the Oriental steamship for England. They reached Malta on the 26th, and on the 1st of June, 1841, he died off Gibraltar, and at half-past eight in the evening his body was committed to the sea in lat. 30° 20´, and long. 6° 42´, the burial service being read by the Rev. James Vaughan. A statue, by Joseph, raised to his memory by public subscription, now stands in the hall of the National gallery, which possesses several of Sir David Wilkie's masterpieces. Allan Cunningham published a life of Wilkie in 1843, in 3 vols., 8vo, which contains fragments of a journal, and remarks on painting. It contains, also, a list of his works, with the prices paid for them. Wilkie was never married. His property was inherited by the sister who lived with him. His unfinished works and other effects, comprising an interesting series of oriental sketches, sold after his death, realized several thousand pounds. Wilkie was tall and of sandy complexion, was of very quiet manners, of no party in politics, but a stanch lover of everything Scotch, and imbued with a strong reverence for the high in place and the wealthy.—R. N. W.  WILKIE,, a celebrated agricultural implement maker, was born at Uddingston, a village situate on the road between Hamilton and Glasgow, on the 18th of May, 1770. He was the only child of James Wilkie and Isabel Rae, both of whose forefathers had been for many generations connected with the village where he was born. Wilkie, whose father was a master-builder, was bred to the separate crafts of the mason and joiner. At the early age of twenty he married the daughter of a respectable farmer in the neighbouring parish of Cambuslang; and it was at the suggestion of his brother-in-law, Mr. Thomas Findlay, that his attention was first turned to the imperfections of the ploughs at that time commonly used. The extreme slowness which for long centuries marked the progress of invention (so humorously described, as the reader may remember, by Cowper in the first book of the Task), is nowhere better illustrated than in the history of the plough. It seems almost past belief that this most useful and necessary of all the instruments employed by the industry of man should have received little or no improvement during the lapse of two thousand years. But such is nevertheless the fact. The forms used by the Greeks and Romans, and which were subsequently adopted by nearly all the nations of Europe, underwent no change till about the sixteenth century, when they began to be improved by the practical ingenuity of the Netherlanders. Further improvements were made by the English in the following century; but the newly-awakened spirit of invention soon travelled northward, and it is to Scotland, and particularly to the subject of the present memoir, that the plough owes that comparative perfection, and adaptability to all kinds of soil, which it now possesses. The ploughs chiefly used in Scotland towards the close of the eighteenth century were the Old Scotch plough, and that constructed by Small, an ingenious cart and plough wright in Midlothian, and author of a treatise on Ploughs and Wheel Carriages, 1784. Small's plough, though superior in many respects to the Old Scotch plough (which indeed differed little from some old forms of the implement common to Europe from the time of the Romans), was still susceptible of great improvement. From the year 1794, when Wilkie began to devote his whole attention to plough-making, till 1798, he formed the wood-work of all his ploughs on certain improved principles suggested to him by his brother-in-law; still continuing, however, to use Small's mould-board. But he found, to use his own words, "that though his ploughs made better work than those formerly used, yet they did not cut out such a deep and narrow furrow as the farmers wished, and did not make neat work in lea (fallow) land. As the principal defect seemed to me to lie in the twist or curve of the mould-board, I put my invention to the rack to get it remedied. After examining ploughs of every construction within my reach, I was of opinion the point ought to be more gentle than formerly towards the point of the sock or share, and that it should become gradually quicker and fuller until the furrow has been set nearly on edge; after which the resistance of the furrow is diminished by making the twist more gentle towards the hinder part of the mould-board. On these principles I constructed a new mould-board, altogether different from any I had ever seen, or that was then in use; and made many trials and alterations on its curve or twist, till I at last fixed on that which I have since used." These improvements, together with others which our space forbids us to describe, soon put all former forms into disuse wherever agriculture has advanced out of its primitive conditions, and have rendered what is now called the Scotch plough "by far the most universal," as it is unquestionably the best, "tillage implement hitherto invented or used." Until 1810 Wilkie's ploughs had been partially constructed of wood, but in that year he may be said to have introduced a new era in the history of the implement by making it wholly of iron, though still after the same model. Some years later he began also to invent and improve other agricultural implements: for a description of which, as well as of his swing plough, single-horse wheel plough, improved friction-wheel plough for two horses, &c., the reader is referred to Loudon's Encyclopædia of Agriculture, and the agricultural reports and journals of the time. This most excellent and ingenious man died at Uddingston on 24th March, 1829. Though the inventions and improvements of John Wilkie cannot claim a large share of that admiration with which we regard the marvellous discoveries that distinguish in so remarkable a degree the recent history of science, they are yet precisely of such a sort as the human mind contemplates with the greatest amount of serene pleasure: for they are intimately connected with the most congenial and important of all the occupations of man—the most ancient, and the mother, of all the arts—what Columella calls "Res sine dubitatione proxima, et quasi consanguinea sapientiæ;" while in their results they reach to the ends of the earth, and have an immediate bearing on the production of the "daily bread" of its innumerable multitudes. But the inventions themselves are not the less the result of a happy though an uncultured genius; and they are moreover in the happiest accordance with the spirit of the modern philosophy—of that philosophy whose business its great founder declared to be to come home to the bosoms of men.—Wilkie was succeeded in the business which he had established at Uddingston, and which still continues in a very flourishing condition, by his son, who seems to have inherited much of his father's ingenuity, and was also distinguished as an inventor and improver of agricultural implements. His "parallel adjusting brake," and "horse hoes" or grubbers were much celebrated in their day; and it may be mentioned that he obtained the Highland and Agricultural Society's premium for the best "turn-wrest" or right and left mould-board plough, the second best being exhibited by the celebrated James Smith of Deanston. James Wilkie died on the 21st of April, 1848, in the forty-eighth year of his age.—R. M., A.  WILKIE,, D.D., the author of "The Epigoniad," was the son of a farmer in the parish of Dalmeny, West Lothian, and was born in 1721. He was educated at the university of Edinburgh, where he became intimately acquainted with Dr. Robertson, Adam Smith, David Hume, and other eminent writers. The death of his father threw upon him the duty of supporting his three sisters; and for this purpose he cultivated the paternal farm while prosecuting his studies, and became conspicuous for his skill in agricultural operations. He was eventually licensed as a preacher of the gospel in 1752, and in the following year was appointed assistant and successor to the minister of Ratho. In 1757 he published "The Epigoniad, a poem in nine books," 12mo; and a second edition appeared in 1759, corrected and improved, with the addition of "A Dream, in the manner of Spenser." "The Epigoniad" was pronounced by Henry Mackenzie "a poem of great merit," and obtained considerable celebrity at the time of its publication, but has now fallen into total oblivion. In 1759 the author was appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the university of St. Andrews, and soon after received the degree of doctor of divinity. In 1768 he published a series of sixteen "Moral Fables, in verse." He died in 1772, in the fifty-first year of his age. Dr. Wilkie was a person of very considerable abilities, but of rude unpolished manners, and eccentric habits. He was extremely parsimonious, and accumulated a good deal of property.—J. T.  WILKINS,, a distinguished oriental scholar, was born at Frome in Somersetshire in 1749. Having obtained a writership on the Bengal establishment in India, he proceeded to Calcutta in 1770, and ere long began to manifest those powers as a linguist which afterwards lent such celebrity to his name. In addition to Arabic and Persian, he acquired several of the spoken languages of India; and in 1778 he gave a signal proof of his accomplishments by printing the Bengalee grammar of Halhed, to whom he furnished the types, and who tells us in 