Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/233

 us. viii. SEPT. 20, 1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

227

DR. JOHN BROWN'S ' HOR^: SUBSECIV^: ' : " TESTE JACOBO GRAY." How many thou- sands of readers of the works of the creator of ' Rab and his Friends,' to mention the story by which Dr. John Brown will be generally remembered, have been puzzled when they happened on the words " teste Jacobo Gray " the Doctor referring in his essay ' Notes on Art ' to his own bad writing ? A decade ago 1 read in The Scotsman an account of the death of Jacobus Gray, so cut out the paragraph, intending to place it in my own copy of ' Horse Subsecivae A. & C. Black's edition. This is, I believe, the most recent complete edition, published in 1900, and it is silent as to the identity of Mr. Gray. Selections from ' Horse Subsecivse ' appeared in "The World's Classics" (Henry Frowde) in 1907, but in that edition the cryptic refer- ence is printed just as written by Dr. John Brown. I put aside the cutting, and until a few days ago had lost sight of it. Lighting upon it, I am sending it below in extenso, to be recorded in ' N. & Q.' for future reference, for in the form a side- headed paragraph in which it appeared in your contemporary it is very probable that but few of the readers of ' Horae Subsecivse ' noticed it. I cannot fix the precise date of the issue which contains the paragraph, but, as Mr. Gray was born in 1818 and died in his eighty-fifth year, the account will be found in The Scotsman for 1903. The paragraph, which may assist a future editor, is as follows :

" DEATH OF AN OLD EDINBURGH PRINTER. To-day is announced the death of Mr. James Gray, whose name was familiar to literary men in Edinburgh of the past generation. Born in 1818, Mr. Gray, in 1830, became apprentice to the old printing firm of Walker & Greig, which ceased to exist in 1836. In that year he entered the Constable printing house in Thistle Street as a ' turnover,' and from that time to within a few weeks of his death, a period of nearly 67 years, he continued in active duty with that firm. For more than thirty years he held the post of general manager, an office which he resigned in 1890 to assume lighter work. During his managership he was brought into close inter- course with most of the leading men of letters in Scotland, many of whom used to acknowledge their obligations to his practical experience. He was a great favourite of the late Dr. John Brown, who enjoyed many a bantering crack with him. Mr. Gray used to point with pleasure to a passage in ' Horse Subsecivse ' (' Notes on Art ' ), in which Dr. Brown proclaims his own bad handwriting, his endless corrections, and his general incoherence as to proofs teste Jacobo Gray. Mr. Gray used playfully to speculate as to how possible editors of the future would fix the identity of the mys- terious Jacobus Gray. He was in his eighty- fifth year."

F. J. B.

24, Old Buildings, Lincoln's Inn, W.C.

WILLIAM MURDOCH, THE INVENTOR OF GAS LIGHTING. (See US. vii. 469; viii. 10, 96.) Through the kindness of MR. R. B. PROSSER I have the reprint of Murdoch's letter of reply to a member of Parliament. This has strengthened my wish to put on record the following with regard to the inventor of gas lighting, if the Editor will allow me space.

In the parish of Auchinleck, the district of Kyle, the county of Ayr, and in the village of Lugar, immortalized by Burns in one of his early and best songs, ' My Nannie, O,' there was born one William Murdoch, the scion of an inventive family, who as a boy, when not at school, looked after his father's cows.

On the bank of the rivulet Bello, which, with Glenmore's junction, formed the River Lugar, Murdoch dug a cave, in which he afterwards experimented with gas lighting. When a scholar, he and his brothers made a wooden horse, on which he went to and from school at Old Cumnock. This method of locomotion anticipated the modern tri- cycle.

His father was the inventor, among other things, of the toothed wheel and pinion gearing, and under him William worked till his twenty-third year. During all this time he had been watching with close attention Watt's inventing of the steam engine at Birmingham. Murdoch determined to inter- view Bolton and Watt, which he did in 1777, wearing a wooden hat which he had turned. This perhaps helped Murdoch to introduce himself ; be that as it may, he was engaged at a wage of 1 5s. a week. He must have shown that he was made of the right metal, for in two years he became principal manager of the works.

In 1781 he was in Cornwall, and there invented and patented a substitute for crank rotary motion, and in the same year pro- duced a model of a locomotive fitted with boiler, &c., and in 1784 he made it draw model waggons, ultimately in the street, which was the cause of no little surprise^ if not consternation. His firm, becoming jealous or afraid of him, offered a sum of money if he produced a vehicle to carry two persons and a load by fuel and water, of course for two hours. Watt was the cause of Murdoch's not carrying out his idea, otherwise there is no doubt there would have been a locomotive on rails fifty years before Stevenson's time.

To return to gas. Murdoch's first attempt was made with one of his mother's old iron