text:
The Trap (HP Lovecraft)

T was on a certain Thursday morning in December that the whole thing began with that unaccountable motion I thought I saw in my antique Copenhagen mirror. Something, it seemed to me, stirred—something reflected in the glass, though I was alone in my quarters. I paused and looked intently, then, deciding that the effect must be a pure illusion, resumed the interrupted brushing of my hair.

I had discovered the old mirror, covered with dust and cobwebs, in an outbuilding of an abandoned estate-house in Santa Cruz’s sparsely settled Northside territory, and had brought it to the United States from the Virgin Islands. The venerable glass was dim from more than two hundred years’ exposure to a tropical climate, and the graceful ornamentation along the top of the gilt frame had been badly smashed. I had had the detached pieces set back into the frame before placing it in storage with my other belongings.

Now, several years later, I was staying half as a guest and half as a tutor at the private school of my old friend Browne on a windy Connecticut hillside—occupying an unused wing in one of the dormitories, where I had two rooms and a hallway to myself. The old mirror, stowed securely in mattresses, was the first of my possessions to be unpacked on my arrival; and I had set it up majestically in the living-room, on top of an old rosewood console which had belonged to my great-grandmother.

The door of my bedroom was just opposite that of the living-room, with a hallway between; and I had noticed that by looking into my chiffonier glass I could see the larger mirror through the two doorways—which was exactly like glancing down an endless, though diminishing, corridor. On this Thursday morning I thought I saw a curious suggestion of motion down that normally empty corridor—but, as I have said, soon dismissed the notion.

When I reached the dining-room I found everyone complaining of the cold, and learned that the school’s heating-plant was temporarily out of order. Being especially sensitive to low temperatures, I was myself an acute sufferer; and at once decided not to brave any freezing schoolroom that day. Accordingly I invited my class to come over to my living-room for an informal session around my grate-fire—a suggestion which the boys received enthusiastically.

After the session one of the boys, Robert Grandison, asked if he might remain; since he had no appointment for the second morning period. I told him to stay, and welcome. He sat down to study in front of the fireplace in a comfortable chair.

It was not long, however, before Robert moved to another chair somewhat farther away from the freshly replenished blaze, this change bringing him directly opposite the old mirror. From my own chair in another part of the room I noticed how fixedly he began to look at the dim, cloudy glass, and, wondering what so greatly interested him, was reminded of my own experience earlier that morning. As time passed he continued to gaze, a slight frown knitting his brows.

At last I quietly asked him what had attracted his attention. Slowly, and still wearing the puzzled frown, he looked over and replied rather cautiously:

“It’s the corrugations in the glass—or whatever they are, Mr. Canevin. I was noticing how they all seem to run from a certain point. Look—I’ll show you what I mean.”

The boy jumped up, went over to the mirror, and placed his finger on a point near its lower left-hand corner.

“It’s right here, sir,” he explained, turning to look toward me and keeping his finger on the chosen spot.

His muscular action in turning may have pressed his finger against the glass. Suddenly he withdrew his hand as though with some slight effort, and with a faintly muttered “Ouch.” Then he looked at the glass in obvious mystification.

“What happened?” I asked, rising and approaching.

“Why—it—” He seemed embarrassed. “It—I—felt—well, as though it were pulling my finger into it. Seems—er—perfectly foolish, sir, but—well—it was a most peculiar sensation.” Robert had an unusual vocabulary for his fifteen years.

I came over and had him show me the exact spot he meant.

“You’ll think I’m rather a fool, sir,” he said shamefacedly, “but—well, from right here I can’t be absolutely sure. From the chair it seemed to be clear enough.”

Now thoroughly interested, I sat down in the chair Robert had occupied and looked at the spot he selected on the mirror. Instantly the thing “jumped out at me.” Unmistakably, from that particular angle, all the many whorls in the ancient glass appeared to converge like a large number of spread strings held in one hand and radiating out in streams.

Getting up and crossing to the mirror, I could no longer see the curious spot. Only from certain angles, apparently, was it visible. Directly viewed, that portion of the mirror did not even give back a normal reflection—for I could not see my face in it. Manifestly I had a minor puzzle on my hands.

Presently the school gong sounded, and the fascinated Robert Grandison departed hurriedly, leaving me alone with my odd little problem in optics. I raised several window-shades, crossed the hallway, and sought for the spot in the chiffonier mirror’s reflection. Finding it readily, I looked very intently and thought I again detected something of the “motion.” I craned my neck, and at last, at a certain angle of vision, the thing again “jumped out at me.”

The vague “motion” was now positive and definite—an appearance of torsional movement, or of whirling; much like a minute yet intense whirlwind or waterspout, or a huddle of autumn leaves dancing circularly in an eddy of wind along a level lawn. It was, like the earth’s, a double motion—around and around, and at the same time inward, as if the whorls poured themselves endlessly toward some point inside the glass. Fascinated, yet realizing that the thing must be an illusion, I grasped an impression of quite distinct suction, and thought of Robert’s embarrassed explanation: “I felt as though it were pulling my finger into it.”

A kind of slight chill ran suddenly up and down my backbone. There was something here distinctly worth looking into. And as the idea of investigation came to me, I recalled the rather wistful expression of Robert Grandison when the gong called him to class. I remembered how he had looked back over his shoulder as he walked obediently out into the hallway, and resolved that he should be included in whatever analysis I might make of this little mystery.

Exciting events connected with that same Robert, however, were soon to chase all thoughts of the mirror from my consciousness for a time. I was away all that afternoon, and did not return to the school until the five-fifteen “Call-Over”—a general assembly at which the boys’ attendance was compulsory. Dropping in at this function with the idea of picking Robert up for a session with the mirror, I was astonished and pained to find him absent—a very unusual and unaccountable thing in his case. That evening Browne told me that the boy had actually disappeared, a search in his room, in the gymnasium, and in all other accustomed places being unavailing, though all his belongings—including his outdoor clothing—were in their proper places.

He had not been encountered on the ice or with any of the hiking groups that afternoon, and telephone calls to all the school-catering merchants of the neighborhood were in vain. There was, in short, no record of his having been seen since the end of the lesson periods at two-fifteen; when he had turned up the stairs toward his room in Dormitory Number Three.

When the disappearance was fully realized, the resulting sensation was tremendous throughout the school. Browne, as headmaster, had to bear the brunt of it; and such an unprecedented occurrence in his well-regulated, highly organized institution left him quite bewildered. It was learned that Robert had not run away to his home in western Pennsylvania, nor did any of the searching-parties of boys and masters find any trace of him in the snowy countryside around the school. So far as could be seen, he had simply vanished.

Robert’s parents arrived on the afternoon of the second day after his disappearance. They took their trouble quietly, though, of course, they were staggered by this unexpected disaster. Browne looked ten years older for it, but there was absolutely nothing that could be done. By the fourth day the case had settled down in the opinion of the school as an insoluble mystery. Mr. and Mrs. Grandison went reluctantly back to their home, and on the following morning the ten days’ Christmas vacation began.

Boys and masters departed in anything but the usual holiday spirit; and Browne and his wife were left, along with the servants, as my only fellow-occupants of the big place. Without the masters and boys it seemed a very hollow shell indeed.

That afternoon I sat in front of my grate-fire thinking about Robert’s disappearance and evolving all sorts of fantastic theories to account for it. By evening I had acquired a bad headache, and ate a light supper accordingly. Then, after a brisk walk around the massed buildings, I returned to my living-room and took up the burden of thought once more.

A little after ten o’clock I awakened in my armchair, stiff and chilled, from a doze during which I had let the fire go out. I was physically uncomfortable, yet mentally aroused by a peculiar sensation of expectancy and possible hope. Of course it had to do with the problem that was harassing me. For I had started from that inadvertent nap with a curious, persistent idea—the odd idea that a tenuous, hardly recognizable Robert Grandison had been trying desperately to communicate with me. I finally went to bed with one conviction unreasoningly strong in my mind. Somehow I was sure that young Robert Grandison was still alive.

That I should be receptive of such a notion will not seem strange to those who know my long residence in the West Indies and my close contact with unexplained happenings there. It will not seem strange, either, that I fell asleep with an urgent desire to establish some sort of mental communication with the missing boy. Even the most prosaic scientists affirm, with Freud, Jung, and Adler, that the subconscious mind is most open to external impressions in sleep; though such impressions are seldom carried over intact into the waking state.

Going a step further and granting the existence of telepathic forces, it follows that such forces must act most strongly on a sleeper; so that if I were ever to get a definite message from Robert, it would be during a period of profoundest slumber. Of course, I might lose the message in waking; but my aptitude for retaining such things has been sharpened by types of mental discipline picked up in various obscure corners of the globe.

I must have dropped asleep instantaneously, and from the vividness of my dreams and the absence of wakeful intervals I judge that my sleep was a very deep one. It was six-forty-five when I awakened, and there still lingered with me certain impressions which I knew were carried over from the world of somnolent cerebration. Filling my mind was the vision of Robert Grandison strangely transformed to a boy of a dull greenish dark-blue color; Robert desperately endeavoring to communicate with me by means of speech, yet finding some almost insuperable difficulty in so doing. A wall of curious spatial separation seemed to stand between him and me—a mysterious, invisible wall which completely baffled us both.

I had seen Robert as though at some distance, yet queerly enough he seemed at the same time to be just beside me. He was both larger and smaller than in real life, his apparent size varying directly, instead of inversely, with the distance as he advanced and retreated in the course of conversation. That is, he grew larger instead of smaller to my eye when he stepped away or backwards, and vice versa; as if the laws of perspective in his case had been wholly reversed. His aspect was misty and uncertain—as if he lacked sharp or permanent outlines; and the anomalies of his coloring and clothing baffled me utterly at first.

At some point in my dream Robert’s vocal efforts had finally crystallized into audible speech—albeit speech of an abnormal thickness and dullness. I could not for a time understand anything he said, and even in the dream racked my brain for a clue to where he was, what he wanted to tell, and why his utterance was so clumsy and unintelligible. Then little by little I began to distinguish words and phrases, the very first of which sufficed to throw my dreaming self into the wildest excitement and to establish a certain mental connection which had previously refused to take conscious form because of the utter incredibility of what it implied.

I do not know how long I listened to those halting words amidst my deep slumber, but hours must have passed while the strangely remote speaker struggled on with his tale. There was revealed to me such a circumstance as I cannot hope to make others believe without the strongest corroborative evidence, yet which I was quite ready to accept as truth—both in the dream and after waking—because of my former contacts with uncanny things. The boy was obviously watching my face—mobile in receptive sleep—as he choked along; for about the time I began to comprehend him, his own expression brightened and gave signs of gratitude and hope.

Any attempt to hint at Robert’s message, as it lingered in my ears after a sudden awakening in the cold, brings this narrative to a point where I must choose my words with the greatest care. Everything involved is so difficult to record that one tends to flounder helplessly. I have said that the revelation established in my mind a certain connection which reason had not allowed me to formulate consciously before. This connection, I need no longer hesitate to hint, had to do with the old Copenhagen mirror whose suggestions of motion had so impressed me on the morning of the disappearance, and whose whorl-like contours and apparent illusions of suction had later exerted such a disquieting fascination on both Robert and me.

Resolutely, though my outer consciousness had previously rejected what my intuition would have liked to imply, it could reject that stupendous conception no longer. What was fantasy in the tale of “Alice” now came to me as a grave and immediate reality. That looking-glass had indeed possessed a malign, abnormal suction; and the struggling speaker in my dream made clear the extent to which it violated all the known precedents of human experience and all the age-old laws of our three sane dimensions. It was more than a mirror—it was a gate; a trap; a link with spatial recesses not meant for the denizens of our visible universe, and realizable only in terms of the most intricate non-Euclidean mathematics. And in some outrageous fashion Robert Grandison had passed out of our ken into the glass and was there immured, waiting for release.

It is significant that upon awakening I harbored no genuine doubt of the reality of the revelation. That I had actually held conversation with a trans-dimensional Robert, rather than evoked the whole episode from my broodings about his disappearance and about the old illusions of the mirror, was as certain to my utmost instincts as any of the instinctive certainties commonly recognized as valid. The tale thus unfolded to me was of the most incredibly bizarre character. As had been clear on the morning of his disappearance, Robert was intensely fascinated by the ancient mirror. All through the hours of school, he had it in mind to come back to my living-room and examine it further. When he did arrive, after the close of the school day, it was somewhat later than two-twenty, and I was absent in town. Finding me out and knowing that I would not mind, he had come into my living-room and gone straight to the mirror; standing before it and studying the place where, as we had noted, the whorls appeared to converge.

Then, quite suddenly, there had come to him an overpowering urge to place his hand upon this whorl-center. Almost reluctantly, against his better judgment, he had done so; and upon making the contact had felt at once the strange, almost painful suction which had perplexed him that morning. Immediately thereafter—quite without warning, but with a wrench which seemed to twist and tear every bone and muscle in his body and to bulge and press and cut at every nerve—he had been abruptly drawn through and found himself inside.

Once through, the excruciatingly painful stress upon his entire system was suddenly released. He felt, he said, as though he had just been born—a feeling that made itself evident every time he tried to do anything; walk, stoop, turn his head, or utter speech. Everything about his body seemed a misfit.

These sensations wore off after a long while, Robert’s body becoming an organized whole rather than a number of protesting parts. Of all the forms of expression, speech remained the most difficult; doubtless because it is complicated, bringing into play a number of different organs, muscles, and tendons. Robert’s feet, on the other hand, were the first members to adjust themselves to the new conditions within the glass.

During the morning hours I rehearsed the whole reason-defying problem; correlating everything I had seen and heard, dismissing the natural scepticism of a man of sense, and scheming to devise possible plans for Robert’s release from his incredible prison. As I did so a number of originally perplexing points became clear—or at least, clearer—to me.

There was, for example, the matter of Robert’s coloring. His face and hands, as I have indicated, were a kind of dull greenish dark-blue; and I may add that his familiar blue Norfolk jacket had turned to a pale lemon-yellow while his trousers remained a neutral gray as before. Reflecting on this after waking, I found the circumstance closely allied to the reversal of perspective which made Robert seem to grow larger when receding and smaller when approaching. Here, too, was a physical reversal—for every detail of his coloring in the unknown dimension was the exact reverse or complement of the corresponding color detail in normal life. In physics the typical complementary colors are blue and yellow, and red and green. These pairs are opposites, and when mixed yield gray. Robert’s natural color was a pinkish-buff, the opposite of which is the greenish-blue I saw. His blue coat had become yellow, while the gray trousers remained gray. This latter point baffled me until I remembered that gray is itself a mixture of opposites. There is no opposite for gray—or rather, it is its own opposite.

Another clarified point was that pertaining to Robert’s curiously dulled and thickened speech—as well as to the general awkwardness and sense of misfit bodily parts of which he complained. This, at the outset, was a puzzle indeed; though after long thought the clue occurred to me. Here again was the same reversal which affected perspective and coloration. Anyone in the fourth dimension must necessarily be reversed in just this way—hands and feet, as well as colors and perspectives, being changed about. It would be the same with all the other dual organs, such as nostrils, ears, and eyes. Thus Robert had been talking with a reversed tongue, teeth, vocal cords, and kindred speech-apparatus; so that his difficulties in utterance were little to be wondered at.

As the morning wore on, my sense of the stark reality and maddening urgency of the dream-disclosed situation increased rather than decreased. More and more I felt that something must be done, yet realized that I could not seek advice or aid. Such a story as mine—a conviction based upon mere dreaming—could not conceivably bring me anything but ridicule or suspicions as to my mental state. And what, indeed, could I do, aided or unaided, with as little working data as my nocturnal impressions had provided? I must, I finally recognized, have more information before I could even think of a possible plan for releasing Robert. This could come only through the receptive conditions of sleep, and it heartened me to reflect that according to every probability my telepathic contact would be resumed the moment I fell into deep slumber again.

I accomplished sleeping that afternoon, after a midday dinner at which, through rigid self-control, I succeeded in concealing from Browne and his wife the tumultuous thoughts that crashed through my mind. Hardly had my eyes closed when a dim telepathic image began to appear; and I soon realized to my infinite excitement that it was identical with what I had seen before. If anything, it was more distinct; and when it began to speak I seemed able to grasp a greater proportion of the words.

During this sleep I found most of the morning’s deductions confirmed, though the interview was mysteriously cut off long prior to my awakening. Robert had seemed apprehensive just before communication ceased, but had already told me that in his strange fourth-dimensional prison colors and spatial relationships were indeed reversed—black being white, distance increasing apparent size, and so on. He had also intimated that, notwithstanding his possession of full physical form and sensations, most human vital properties seemed curiously suspended. Nutriment, for example, was quite unnecessary—a phenomenon really more singular than the omnipresent reversal of objects and attributes, since the latter was a reasonable and mathematically indicated state of things. Another significant piece of information was that the only exit from the glass to the world was the entrance-way, and that this was permanently barred and impenetrably sealed, so far as egress was concerned.

That night I had another visitation from Robert; nor did such impressions, received at odd intervals while I slept receptively minded, cease during the entire period of his incarceration. His efforts to communicate were desperate and often pitiful; for at times the telepathic bond would weaken, while at other times fatigue, excitement, or fear of interruption would hamper and thicken his speech. I may as well narrate as a continuous whole all that Robert told me throughout the whole series of transient mental contacts—perhaps supplementing it at certain points with facts directly related after his release. The telepathic information was fragmentary and often nearly inarticulate, but I studied it over and over during the waking intervals of three intense days; classifying and cogitating with feverish diligence, since it was all that I had to go upon if the boy were to be brought back into our world.

The fourth-dimensional region in which Robert found himself was not, as in scientific romance, an unknown and infinite realm of strange sights and fantastic denizens; but was rather a projection of certain limited parts of our own terrestrial sphere within an alien and normally inaccessible aspect or direction of space. It was a curiously fragmentary, intangible, and heterogeneous world—a series of apparently dissociated scenes merging indistinctly one into the other; their constituent details having an obviously different status from that of an object drawn into the ancient mirror as Robert had been drawn. These scenes were like dream-vistas or magic-lantern images—elusive visual impressions of which the boy was not really a part, but which formed a sort of panoramic background or ethereal environment against which or amidst which he moved.

He could not touch any of the parts of these scenes—walls, trees, furniture, and the like—but whether this was because they were truly non-material, or because they always receded at his approach, he was singularly unable to determine. Everything seemed fluid, mutable, and unreal. When he walked, it appeared to be on whatever lower surface the visible scene might have—floor, path, greensward, or such; but upon analysis he always found that the contact was an illusion. There was never any difference in the resisting force met by his feet—and by his hands when he would stoop experimentally—no matter what changes of apparent surface might be involved. He could not describe this foundation or limiting plane on which he walked as anything more definite than a virtually abstract pressure balancing his gravity. Of definite tactile distinctiveness it had none, and supplementing it there seemed to be a kind of restricted levitational force which accomplished transfers of altitude. He could never actually climb stairs, yet would gradually walk up from a lower level to a higher.

Passage from one definite scene to another involved a sort of gliding through a region of shadow or blurred focus where the details of each scene mingled curiously. All the vistas were distinguished by the absence of transient objects, and the indefinite or ambiguous appearance of such semi-transient objects as furniture or details of vegetation. The lighting of every scene was diffuse and perplexing, and of course the scheme of reversed colors—bright red grass, yellow sky with confused black and gray cloud-forms, white tree-trunks, and green brick walls—gave to everything an air of unbelievable grotesquerie. There was an alteration of day and night, which turned out to be a reversal of the normal hours of light and darkness at whatever point on the earth the mirror might be hanging.

This seemingly irrelevant diversity of the scenes puzzled Robert until he realized that they comprised merely such places as had been reflected for long continuous periods in the ancient glass. This also explained the odd absence of transient objects, the generally arbitrary boundaries of vision, and the fact that all exteriors were framed by the outlines of doorways or windows. The glass, it appeared, had power to store up these intangible scenes through long exposure; though it could never absorb anything corporeally, as Robert had been absorbed, except by a very different and particular process.

But—to me at least—the most incredible aspect of the mad phenomenon was the monstrous subversion of our known laws of space involved in the relation of various illusory scenes to the actual terrestrial regions represented. I have spoken of the glass as storing up the images of these regions, but this is really an inexact definition. In truth, each of the mirror scenes formed a true and quasi-permanent fourth-dimensional projection of the corresponding mundane region; so that whenever Robert moved to a certain part of a certain scene, as he moved into the image of my room when sending his telepathic messages, he was actually in that place itself, on earth—though under spatial conditions which cut off all sensory communication, in either direction, between him and the present tri-dimensional aspect of the place.

Theoretically speaking, a prisoner in the glass could in a few moments go anywhere on our planet—into any place, that is, which had ever been reflected in the mirror’s surface. This probably applied even to places where the mirror had not hung long enough to produce a clear illusory scene; the terrestrial region being then represented by a zone of more or less formless shadow. Outside the definite scenes was a seemingly limitless waste of neutral gray shadow about which Robert could never be certain, and into which he never dared stray far lest he become hopelessly lost to the real and mirror worlds alike.

Among the earliest particulars which Robert gave, was the fact that he was not alone in his confinement. Various others, all in antique garb, were in there with him—a corpulent middle-aged gentleman with tied queue and velvet knee-breeches who spoke English fluently though with a marked Scandinavian accent; a rather beautiful small girl with very blonde hair which appeared a glossy dark blue; two apparently mute Negroes whose features contrasted grotesquely with the pallor of their reversed-colored skins; three young men; one young woman; a very small child, almost an infant; and a lean, elderly Dane of extremely distinctive aspect and a kind of half-malign intellectuality of countenance.

This last-named individual—Axel Holm, who wore the satin small-clothes, flared-skirted coat, and voluminous full-bottomed periwig of an age more than two centuries in the past—was notable among the little band as being the one responsible for the presence of them all. He it was who, skilled equally in the arts of magic and glass working, had long ago fashioned this strange dimensional prison in which himself, his slaves, and those whom he chose to invite or allure thither were immured unchangingly for as long as the mirror might endure. Holm was born early in the seventeenth century, and had followed with tremendous competence and success the trade of a glass-blower and molder in Copenhagen. His glass, especially in the form of large drawing-room mirrors, was always at a premium. But the same bold mind which had made him the first glazier of Europe also served to carry his interests and ambitions far beyond the sphere of mere material craftsmanship. He had studied the world around him, and chafed at the limitations of human knowledge and capability. Eventually he sought for dark ways to overcome those limitations, and gained more success than is good for any mortal.

He had aspired to enjoy something like eternity, the mirror being his provision to secure this end. Serious study of the fourth dimension was far from beginning with Einstein in our own era; and Holm, more than erudite in all the methods of his day, knew that a bodily entrance into that hidden phase of space would prevent him from dying in the ordinary physical sense. Research showed him that the principle of reflection undoubtedly forms the chief gate to all dimensions beyond our familiar three; and chance placed in his hands a small and very ancient glass whose cryptic properties he believed he could turn to advantage. Once “inside” this mirror according to the method he had envisaged, he felt that “life” in the sense of form and consciousness would go on virtually forever, provided the mirror could be preserved indefinitely from breakage or deterioration.

Holm made a magnificent mirror, such as would be prized and carefully preserved; and in it deftly fused the strange whorl-configured relic he had acquired. Having thus prepared his refuge and his trap, he began to plan his mode of entrance and conditions of tenancy. He would have with him both servitors and companions; and as an experimental beginning he sent before him into the glass two dependable Negro slaves brought from the West Indies. What his sensations must have been upon beholding this first concrete demonstration of his theories, only imagination can conceive.

Undoubtedly a man of his knowledge realized that absence from the outside world, if deferred beyond the natural span of life of those within, must mean instant dissolution at the first attempt to return to that world. But, barring that misfortune or accidental breakage, those within would remain forever as they were at the time of entrance. They would never grow old, and would need neither food nor drink. To make his prison tolerable he sent ahead of him certain books and writing materials, a chair and table of stoutest workmanship, and a few other accessories. He knew that the images which the glass would reflect or absorb would not be tangible, but would merely extend around him like a background of dream. His own transition in 1687 was a momentous experience; and must have been attended by mixed sensations of triumph and terror. Had anything gone wrong, there were frightful possibilities of being lost in dark and inconceivable multiple dimensions.

For over fifty years he had been unable to secure any additions to the little company of himself and slaves, but later on he had perfected his telepathic method of visualizing small sections of the outside world close to the glass, and attracting certain individuals in those areas through the mirror’s strange entrance. Thus Robert, influenced into a desire to press upon the “door,” had been lured within. Such visualizations depended wholly on telepathy, since no one inside the mirror could see out into the world of men. It was, in truth, a strange life that Holm and his company had lived inside the glass. Since the mirror had stood for fully a century with its face to the dusty stone wall of the shed where I found it, Robert was the first being to enter this limbo after all that interval. His arrival was a gala event, for he brought news of the outside world which must have been of the most startling impressiveness to the more thoughtful of those within. He, in his turn—young though he was—felt overwhelmingly the weirdness of meeting and talking with persons who had been alive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The deadly monotony of life for the prisoners can only be vaguely conjectured. As mentioned, its extensive spatial variety was limited to localities which had been reflected in the mirror for long periods; and many of these had become dim and strange as tropical climates had made inroads on the surface. Certain localities were bright and beautiful, and in these the company usually gathered. But no scene could be fully satisfying; since the visible objects were all unreal and intangible, and often of perplexingly indefinite outline. When the tedious periods of darkness came, the general custom was to indulge in memories, reflections, or conversations. Each one of that strange, pathetic group had retained his or her personality unchanged and unchangeable, since becoming immune to the time effects of outside space. The number of inanimate objects within the glass, aside from the clothing of the prisoners, was very small; being largely limited to the accessories Holm had provided for himself. The rest did without even furniture, since sleep and fatigue had vanished along with most other vital attributes. Such inorganic things as were present, seemed as exempt from decay as the living beings. The lower forms of animal life were wholly absent.

Robert derived most of his information from Herr Thiele, the gentleman who spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. This portly Dane had taken a fancy to him, and talked at considerable length. The others, too, had received him with courtesy and goodwill; Holm himself, seeming well-disposed, had told him about various matters including the door of the trap.

The boy, as he told me later, was sensible enough never to attempt communication with me when Holm was nearby. Twice, while thus engaged, he had seen Holm appear; and had accordingly ceased at once. At no time could I see the world behind the mirror’s surface. Robert’s visual image, which included his bodily form and the clothing connected with it, was—like the aural image of his halting voice and like his own visualization of myself—a case of purely telepathic transmission; and did not involve true interdimensional sight. However, had Robert been as trained a telepathist as Holm, he might have transmitted a few strong images apart from his immediate person. Throughout this period of revelation I had, of course, been desperately trying to devise a method for Robert’s release. On the fourth day—the ninth after the disappearance—I hit on a solution. Everything considered, my laboriously formulated process was not a very complicated one; though I could not tell beforehand how it would work, while the possibility of ruinous consequences in case of a slip was appalling. This process depended, basically, on the fact that there was no possible exit from inside the glass. If Holm and his prisoners were permanently sealed in, then release must come wholly from outside. Other considerations included the disposal of the other prisoners, if any survived, and especially of Axel Holm. What Robert had told me of him was anything but reassuring; and I certainly did not wish him loose in my apartment, free once more to work his evil will upon the world. The telepathic messages had not made fully clear the effect of liberation on those who had entered the glass so long ago.

There was, too, a final though minor problem in case of success—that of getting Robert back into the routine of school life without having to explain the incredible. In case of failure, it was highly inadvisable to have witnesses present at the release operations—and lacking these, I simply could not attempt to relate the actual facts if I should succeed. Even to me the reality seemed a mad one whenever I let my mind turn from the data so compellingly presented in that tense series of dreams.

When I had thought these problems through as far as possible, I procured a large magnifying-glass from the school laboratory and studied minutely every square millimeter of that whorl-center which presumably marked the extent of the original ancient mirror used by Holm. Even with this aid I could not quite trace the exact boundary between the old area and the surface added by the Danish wizard: but after a long study decided on a conjectural oval boundary which I outlined very precisely with a soft blue pencil. I then made a trip to Stamford, where I procured a heavy glass-cutting tool; for my primary idea was to remove the ancient and magically potent mirror from its later setting.

My next step was to figure out the best time of day to make the crucial experiment. I finally settled on two-thirty a.m.—both because it was a good season for uninterrupted work, and because it was the “opposite” of two-thirty p.m., the probable moment at which Robert had entered the mirror. This form of “oppositeness” may or may not have been relevant, but I knew at least that the chosen hour was as good as any—and perhaps better than most.

I finally set to work in the early morning of the eleventh day after the disappearance, having drawn all the shades of my living-room and closed and locked the door into the hallway. Following with breathless care the elliptical line I had traced, I worked around the whorl-section with my steel-wheeled cutting tool. The ancient glass, half an inch thick, crackled crisply under the firm, uniform pressure; and upon completing the circuit I cut around it a second time, crunching the roller more deeply into the glass.

Then, very carefully indeed, I lifted the heavy mirror down from its console and leaned it face-inward against the wall; prying off two of the thin, narrow boards nailed to the back. With equal caution I smartly tapped the cut-around space with the heavy wooden handle of the glass-cutter.

At the very first tap the whorl-containing section of glass dropped out on the Bokhara rug beneath. I did not know what might happen, but was keyed up for anything, and took a deep involuntary breath. I was on my knees for convenience at the moment, with my face quite near the newly made aperture; and as I breathed there poured into my nostrils a powerful dusty odor—a smell not comparable to any other I have ever encountered. Then everything within my range of vision suddenly turned to a dull gray before my failing eyesight as I felt myself overpowered by an invisible force which robbed my muscles of their power to function.

I remember grasping weakly and futilely at the edge of the nearest window drapery and feeling it rip loose from its fastening. Then I sank slowly to the floor as the darkness of oblivion passed over me.

When I regained consciousness I was lying on the Bokhara rug with my legs held unaccountably up in the air. The room was full of that hideous and inexplicable dusty smell—and as my eyes began to take in definite images I saw that Robert Grandison stood in front of me. It was he—fully in the flesh and with his coloring normal—who was holding my legs aloft to bring the blood back to my head as the school’s first-aid course had taught him to do with persons who had fainted. For a moment I was struck mute by the stifling odor and by a bewilderment which quickly merged into a sense of triumph. Then I found myself able to move and speak collectedly.

I raised a tentative hand and waved feebly at Robert.

“All right, old man,” I murmured, “you can let my legs down now. Many thanks. I’m all right again, I think. It was the smell—I imagine—that got me. Open that farthest window, please—wide—from the bottom. That’s it—thanks. No—leave the shade down the way it was.” I struggled to my feet, my disturbed circulation adjusting itself in waves, and stood upright hanging to the back of a big chair. I was still “groggy,” but a blast of fresh, bitterly cold air from the window revived me rapidly. I sat down in the big chair and looked at Robert, now walking toward me.

“First,” I said hurriedly, “tell me, Robert—those others—Holm? What happened to them, when I—opened the exit?”

Robert paused half-way across the room and looked at me very gravely.

“I saw them fade away—into nothingness—Mr. Canevin,” he said with solemnity; “and with them—everything. There isn’t any more ‘inside,’ sir—thank God, and you, sir!”

And young Robert, at last yielding to the sustained strain which he had borne through all those terrible eleven days, suddenly broke down like a little child and began to weep hysterically in great, stifling, dry sobs.

I picked him up and placed him gently on my davenport, threw a rug over him, sat down by his side, and put a calming hand on his forehead. “Take it easy, old fellow,” I said soothingly.

The boy’s sudden and very natural hysteria passed as quickly as it had come on as I talked to him reassuringly about my plans for his quiet restoration to the school. The interest of the situation and the need of concealing the incredible truth beneath a rational explanation took hold of his imagination as I had expected; and at last he sat up eagerly, telling the details of his release and listening to the instructions I had thought out. He had, it seems, been in the “projected area” of my bedroom when I opened the way back, and had emerged in that actual room—hardly realizing that he was “out.” Upon hearing a fall in the living-room he had hastened thither, finding me on the rug in my fainting spell.

I need mention only briefly my method of restoring Robert in a seemingly normal way—how I smuggled him out of the window in an old hat and sweater of mine, took him down the road in my quietly started car, coached him carefully in a tale I had devised, and returned to arouse Browne with the news of his discovery. He had, I explained, been walking alone on the afternoon of his disappearance; and had been offered a motor ride by two young men who, as a joke and over his protests that he could go no farther than Stamford and back, had begun to carry him past that town. Jumping from the car during a traffic stop with the intention of hitch-hiking back before Call-Over, he had been hit by another car just as the traffic was released—awakening ten days later in the Greenwich home of the people who had hit him. On learning the date, I added, he had immediately telephoned the school; and I, being the only one awake, had answered the call and hurried after him in my car without stopping to notify anyone.

Browne, who at once telephoned to Robert’s parents, accepted my story without question; and forbore to interrogate the boy because of the latter’s manifest exhaustion. It was arranged that he should remain at the school for a rest, under the expert care of Mrs. Browne, a former trained nurse. I naturally saw a good deal of him during the remainder of the Christmas vacation, and was thus enabled to fill in certain gaps in his fragmentary dream-story.

Now and then we would almost doubt the actuality of what had occurred; wondering whether we had not both shared some monstrous delusion born of the mirror’s glittering hypnotism, and whether the tale of the ride and accident were not after all the real truth. But whenever we did so we would be brought back to belief by some monstrous and haunting memory; with me, of Robert’s dream-figure and its thick voice and inverted colors; with him, of the whole fantastic pageantry of ancient people and dead scenes that he had witnessed. And then there was that joint recollection of that damnable dusty odor. . . . We knew what it meant: the instant dissolution of those who had entered an alien dimension a century and more ago.

There are, in addition, at least two lines of rather more positive evidence; one of which comes through my researches in Danish annals concerning the sorcerer, Axel Holm. Such a person, indeed, left many traces in folklore and written records; and diligent library sessions, plus conferences with various learned Danes, have shed much more light on his evil fame. At present I need say only that the Copenhagen glass-blower—born in 1612—was a notorious Luciferian whose pursuits and final vanishing formed a matter of awed debate over two centuries ago. He had burned with a desire to know all things and to conquer every limitation of mankind—to which end he had delved deeply into occult and forbidden fields ever since he was a child.

He was commonly held to have joined a coven of the dreaded witch-cult, and the vast lore of ancient Scandinavian myth—with its Loki the Sly One and the accursed Fenris-Wolf—was soon an open book to him. He had strange interests and objectives, few of which were definitely known, but some of which were recognized as intolerably evil. It is recorded that his two Negro helpers, originally slaves from the Danish West Indies, had become mute soon after their acquisition by him; and that they had disappeared not long before his own disappearance from the ken of mankind.

Near the close of an already long life the idea of a glass of immortality appears to have entered his mind. That he had acquired an enchanted mirror of inconceivable antiquity was a matter of common whispering; it being alleged that he had purloined it from a fellow-sorcerer who had entrusted it to him for polishing.

This mirror—according to popular tales a trophy as potent in its way as the better-known Aegis of Minerva or Hammer of Thor—was a small oval object called “Loki’s Glass,” made of some polished fusible mineral and having magical properties which included the divination of the immediate future and the power to show the possessor his enemies. That it had deeper potential properties, realizable in the hands of an erudite magician, none of the common people doubted; and even educated persons attached much fearful importance to Holm’s rumored attempts to incorporate it in a larger glass of immortality. Then had come the wizard’s disappearance in 1687, and the final sale and dispersal of his goods amidst a growing cloud of fantastic legendry. It was, altogether, just such a story as one would laugh at if possessed of no particular key; yet to me, remembering those dream messages and having Robert Grandison’s corroboration before me, it formed a positive confirmation of all the bewildering marvels that had been unfolded.

But as I have said, there is still another line of rather positive evidence—of a very different character—at my disposal. Two days after his release, as Robert, greatly improved in strength and appearance, was placing a log on my living-room fire, I noticed a certain awkwardness in his motions and was struck by a persistent idea. Summoning him to my desk I suddenly asked him to pick up an ink-stand—and was scarcely surprised to note that, despite lifelong right-handedness, he obeyed unconsciously with his left hand. Without alarming him, I then asked that he unbutton his coat and let me listen to his cardiac action. What I found upon placing my ear to his chest—and what I did not tell him for some time afterward—was that his heart was beating on his right side.

He had gone into the glass right-handed and with all organs in their normal positions. Now he was left-handed and with organs reversed, and would doubtless continue so for the rest of his life. Clearly, the dimensional transition had been no illusion—for this physical change was tangible and unmistakable. Had there been a natural exit from the glass, Robert would probably have undergone a thorough re-reversal and emerged in perfect normality—as indeed the color-scheme of his body and clothing did emerge. The forcible nature of his release, however, undoubtedly set something awry; so that dimensions no longer had a chance to right themselves as chromatic wave-frequencies still did.

I had not merely opened Holm’s trap; I had destroyed it; and at the particular stage of destruction marked by Robert’s escape some of the reversing properties had perished. It is significant that in escaping Robert had felt no pain comparable to that experienced in entering. Had the destruction been still more sudden, I shiver to think of the monstrosities of color the boy would always have been forced to bear. I may add that after discovering Robert’s reversal I examined the rumpled and discarded clothing he had worn in the glass, and found, as I had expected, a complete reversal of pockets, buttons, and all other corresponding details.

At this moment Loki’s Glass, just as it fell on my Bokhara rug from the now patched and harmless mirror, weighs down a sheaf of papers on my writing-table here in St. Thomas, venerable capital of the Danish West Indies—now the American Virgin Islands. Various collectors of old Sandwich glass have mistaken it for an odd bit of that early American product—but I privately realize that my paper-weight is an antique of far subtler and more paleogean craftsmanship. Still, I do not disillusion such enthusiasts.

title: The Trap (HP Lovecraft)


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/238

 years and upwards were extremely rare. Although Thoms proved less sceptical than Sir [q. v.], not even the histories of Jenkins, Parr, or the Countess of Desmond satisfied his tests of legal evidence. This was followed in 1879 by the ‘Curll Papers,’ London, 8vo. Thoms died in London at his house in St. George's Square, Belgrave Road, on 15 Aug. 1885, and was buried at Brompton cemetery. In 1828 he was married to Laura, youngest daughter of John Bernard Sale [see under ], a well-known figure in the musical world. By her he left three sons and six daughters.

In 1876–7 he published in ‘Notes and Queries’ an account of the history of the paper, and in 1881 he contributed some very interesting autobiographical memoirs to the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ under the title ‘Gossip of an Old Bookworm.’

Thoms went little into society, but at congenial resorts, such as the ‘Cocked Hat Club,’ he was remarkable for a ready play of wit and an almost inexhaustible fund of humorous anecdote and reminiscence.

 THOMSON. [See also, , and .]

THOMSON, ALEXANDER (1763–1803), poet, was born on 7 Aug. 1763. He resided in Edinburgh, and was an intimate friend of (1750–1830) [q. v.] Thomson was the author of several poems, of which the best known were ‘Whist’ (London, 1791, 4to; 2nd edit. 1792, 8vo) and ‘An Essay on Novels’ (Edinburgh, 1793, 4to). He died in Edinburgh on 7 Nov. 1803, leaving a widow and six daughters.

Besides the works mentioned, Thomson published: He also published ‘The German Miscellany,’ Perth, 1796, 12mo, consisting of translations from Kotzebue and Meissner, and translated Kotzebue's comedy, ‘The East Indian,’ London, 1799, 8vo. He left an unfinished ‘History of Scottish Poetry.’
 * 1) ‘The Choice,’ a poem, Edinburgh, 1788, 4to.
 * 2) ‘The Paradise of Taste,’ London, 1796, 4to.
 * 3) ‘Pictures of Poetry,’ Edinburgh, 1799, 8vo.
 * 4) ‘The British Parnassus at the Close of the Eighteenth Century,’ Edinburgh, 1801, 4to.
 * 5) ‘Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies,’ Edinburgh, 1801, 8vo.

 THOMSON, ALEXANDER (1817–1875), architect, known as ‘Greek Thomson,’ born at Balfron in Stirlingshire in 1817, was the son of John Thomson, bookkeeper in a spinning-mill at Balfron, by his second wife, Elizabeth Cooper, sister of the burgher minister at Balfron. After serving for a short time in a lawyer's office, Robert Foote, an architect, saw some drawings by him, and took him as an apprentice. About 1834 he entered the office of John Baird, an architect in Glasgow, and about 1847 went into partnership with John Baird, his son. While in partnership with John Baird he assisted him in the plans (which were not carried out) for the new buildings for the university of Glasgow in a style imitating the old college buildings. Convincing himself of the inferiority of this style, he determined to follow in his future work the principles of Greek architecture. ‘Greek Thomson,’ as he was thenceforth generally called, to distinguish him from other architects of the same name in Glasgow, was perhaps the most original architect of modern times. His ability was acknowledged by Gothic architects such as William Burgess; and Roger Smith, speaking in London at the Society of Arts, called him an architect of genius. He never had the opportunity of designing great buildings; but whether he designed shops and tenements, merchants' offices, rows of houses, or united presbyterian churches, he made every building remarkable, and impressed it with the stamp of genius. His style, while developed to carry out modern requirements, was founded on Greek architecture, breathing its spirit rather than strictly following its forms, and sometimes adopting features which suggested ancient Eastern styles. He had a fine sense of proportion, and gave to common buildings massiveness and dignity. His influence affected the general architecture of Glasgow, giving it largeness and dignity, and it still inspires students of the art.

Thomson died at Glasgow on 22 March 1875, leaving a widow and seven children. Among his works in Glasgow may be mentioned the united presbyterian churches in Caledonia Road, in Vincent Street, and in Queen's Park, the Egyptian Hall in Union Street, and almost all the buildings in Gordon Street.

His younger brother, George Thomson (1819–1878), was born at Balfron on 26 March 1819. He was associated with Alexander from 1856 till 1871, when he went as a missionary to Victoria in the Cameroons. He died there on 14 Dec. 1878.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/239

THOMSON, ALLEN (1809–1884), biologist, only son of (1765–1846) [q. v.] by his second wife, Margaret, daughter of (1735–1801) [q. v.], was born in Edinburgh on 2 April 1809, and was named after his father's friend, John Allen (1771–1843), secretary and confidential friend of Lord Holland. (1802–1852) [q. v.] was his half-brother. Allen Thomson was educated at the high school and university of Edinburgh, and afterwards at Paris. He graduated doctor of medicine at the university of Edinburgh in August 1830. At the time of his graduation he was president of the Royal Medical Society in Edinburgh. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1831, and he then proceeded to Holland and Germany, visiting the anatomical and pathological museums, and taking elaborate notes of all that he saw. On his return to Edinburgh he began to lecture at 9 Surgeon's Square as an extra-academical teacher of physiology in association with [q. v.], who lectured on anatomy. These lectures were given from 1831 to 1836, and during the latter part of the time Thomson assisted also in teaching anatomy. In 1833 he travelled with his father for nearly three months, visiting the principal medical schools in Holland, Germany, Italy, and France, and meeting most of the noted scientific men of the time. From 1837 to 1839, at the instance of Lord Holland, he became private physician to the Duke of Bedford, then an invalid.

He was appointed professor of anatomy in the Marischal College, Aberdeen, in October 1839; but upon the collapse of the joint school in the university in 1841 he resigned his chair, and again became an extramural teacher at 1 Surgeon's Square, Edinburgh. In the summer of 1842 he delivered a special course of lectures upon microscopic anatomy, a subject which was then new. In these lectures he supplemented the views of German observers with the results of his own investigations, and the course became justly celebrated. In 1841 [q. v.] resigned the chair of physiology in Edinburgh, and in 1842 Dr. Thomson was elected his successor. He occupied this chair for six years, making several important contributions to the science of embryology; but, his affection for anatomy remaining undiminished, he was appointed professor of anatomy in the university of Glasgow in 1848, in succession to Dr. James Jeffray. This chair he held with great distinction until 1877, when he resigned it and came to reside in London.

During his distinguished career Thomson received many scientific honours. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1838, and of the Royal Society of London in 1848. He became a councillor of the Royal Society of London in 1877, and one of the vice-presidents in 1878. He was president of the Philosophical Society, of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, and of the Science Lectures Association in Glasgow, and in this city he was also the first president of the local branch of the British Medical Association. From 1859 to 1877 he represented the universities of Glasgow and of St. Andrews jointly in the General Medical Council, where his ripe experience and calm judgment enabled him to do good service to the cause of medical education. He was president of the biological section of the British Association at the Edinburgh meeting in 1871, and in 1876 was elected president of the association. In his presidential address in the following year he reviewed the history of the Darwinian theory of evolution. In 1871 the university of Edinburgh conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., the university of Glasgow paid him a similar compliment in 1877, and he received the degree of D.C.L. from the university of Oxford in 1882.

While thus pursuing a scientific career, Allen Thomson was well known as one of the most active and influential citizens of Glasgow. He acted as chairman of the removal and buildings committee of the university of Glasgow from 1863 to 1874, and it was chiefly due to his tact and energy that the university buildings on Gilmorehill were successfully completed and occupied. He also took an active part in the erection of the Western Infirmary.

He died in London on 21 March 1884, at 66 Palace Gardens Terrace, leaving a widow, Ninian Jane, the daughter of Ninian Hill, writer to the signet, Edinburgh. By her he had an only son, John Millar Thomson, professor of chemistry at King's College, London.

Allen Thomson was the first of the great biological teachers of the nineteenth century, in contrast with earlier natural historians. Only less great than Huxley, he differed from him in lack of polemical spirit. He was endowed with a keen critical faculty as well as


text:
Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/530

472 settlement, and I was delighted to see this truly beautiful site for a town or city, as will be no doubt some fifty years hence. The hills themselves are about 200 feet above the river, and slope down gently into the beautiful prairie that extends over some thousands of acres, of the richest land imaginable. Five of our trappers did not come on board at the ringing of the bell, and had to walk several miles across a bend to join us and be taken on again. We have not seen much game this day, probably on account of the high wind. We saw, however, a large flock of Willets, two Gulls, one Grebe, many Blue-winged Teals, Wood Ducks, and Coots, and one pair of mated Wild Geese. This afternoon a Black Squirrel was seen. This morning I saw a Marmot; and Sprague, a Sciurus macrourus of Say. On examination of the Finch killed by Harris yesterday, I found it to be a new species, and I have taken its measurements across this sheet of paper. It was first seen on the ground, then on low bushes, then on large trees; no note was heard. Two others, that were females to all appearance, could not be procure'd on account of their extreme shyness. We saw the Indigo-bird, Barn Swallows, Purple Martin, and Greenbacks; also, a Rabbit at the Black Snake Hills. The general aspect of the river is materially altered for the worse; it has become much more crooked or tortuous, in some places very wide with sand-banks naked and dried, so that the wind blows the sand quite high. In one place we came to a narrow and swift chute, four miles above the Black Snake

title: Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/530


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/240

 with an innate love of truth for its own sake. His writings are characterised more by fulness of knowledge, clearness of statement, and soundness of judgment than by originality. Excess of caution in coming to a conclusion was so marked a feature in him that his name is not associated with any broad generalisation in science. He published no independent work, but his writings in scientific periodicals are numerous, and are models of clearness of statement and skilful marshalling of facts. He was one of the main exponents of embryology in this country at a time when the science was in its infancy; and his papers show abundant evidence of personal investigation and critical inquiry. In all his researches his mind inclined more to the anatomical than to the physiological side of biology. He traced chiefly the development of organs, more especially of the circulation and of the genito-urinary systems. He was an able draughtsman, and his diagrams are still to be met with in nearly every textbook of anatomy and physiology. He wrote on physiological optics, more especially on the mechanism by which the eye accommodates or focusses itself for objects at different distances.

Thomson took part in editing the seventh, eighth, and ninth editions of Quain's ‘Elements of Anatomy.’ He was associated in the seventh edition with Professor Sharpey and Professor Cleland, in the eighth with Professor Sharpey and Professor Schäfer, and in the ninth edition with Professor Schäfer and Professor Thane. He also edited the second volume of Cullen's ‘Life,’ and to the reissue of the first volume he prefixed a biographical notice of his half-brother.

On his retirement in 1877 Thomson's portrait, painted by Sir Daniel Macnee, was presented to the university of Glasgow, and now hangs in the Hunterian Museum. It does scanty justice to the animated expression of his features.

[Professor MacKendrick's obituary notice in the Proc. of the Phil. Soc. of Glasgow, vol. xv. 1883–4; the obituary notice in the Proc. of the Royal Soc. 1887, vol. xlii. p. xii; private information.]  THOMSON, ANDREW MITCHELL (1779–1831), Scottish divine, second son of the Rev. John Thomson, D.D., by his first wife, Helen Forrest, was born at Sanquhar, Dumfriesshire, where his father was minister, on 11 July 1779. Educated at the parish school, Markinch, Fife, whither his father had moved, and at Edinburgh University, which he left in 1800, he was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Kelso; but before receiving a clerical charge he was schoolmaster at Markinch. In 1802 he was appointed parish minister at Sprouston, Roxburghshire. In 1808 he was transferred to the East Church, Perth; in 1810 to New Greyfriars, Edinburgh; and in 1814, on the opening of the church, to St. George's of that city. Here he remained until his death.

When the Edinburgh town council presented him to Greyfriars there was strong opposition, but immediately after his appointment he became one of the most powerful of the Edinburgh preachers. He insisted on high efficiency in the singing at his church, and was largely responsible for an improved psalmody in Scottish church worship. He issued a new set of tunes, some of which he composed himself, ‘Redemption’ and ‘St. George's, Edinburgh,’ being among them. He belonged to the evangelical section of the church of Scotland, and was strongly opposed to the interference of the state in matters spiritual. For the last few years of his life he was indisputably leader of the evangelical party. In the general assembly he identified himself with the reformers, and took part in the debates against pluralities in livings and the abuses of lay patronage. Like Dr. Chalmers, his ecclesiastical successor, he was keenly interested in social questions. He was one of the pioneers of the modern education movement, and founded in Edinburgh a weekday school, known as ‘Dr. Andrew Thomson's.’ He also took a prominent part in the agitation against slavery in the British colonies, advocating immediate and not gradual abolition. His public spirit is aptly illustrated by the fact that, when an alarm was spread that the French had landed, he gathered the Sprouston volunteers and marched into Kelso at their head.

He was mainly responsible for the famous ‘Apocrypha controversy,’ which he originated in 1827 by surrendering his membership of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and assailing it in the pages of his ‘Christian Instructor’ for having bound up the Apocrypha with the Bible. He declined the offer of the degree of D.D. from the Columbia College, New York, in 1818, but accepted the same honour when Aberdeen University offered it in 1823.

He died suddenly in the street, when returning from a meeting of presbytery, on 9 Feb. 1831. Dr. Chalmers preached one of his funeral sermons, and he was buried in St. Cuthbert's churchyard, Edinburgh. In 1802 he married Jane Carmichael, who survived him and had by him seven children. His eldest son, John Thomson (1805–1841), is separately noticed.

He edited and wrote in the ‘Christian


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/241

 Instructor,’ which he started in Edinburgh in 1810, and he contributed to Brewster's ‘Edinburgh Encyclopædia,’ of which he was part proprietor. His chief works are: 1. ‘A Catechism for the Instruction of Communicants,’ Edinburgh, 1808. 2. ‘Lectures Expository and Practical,’ 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1816. 3. ‘Lovers of Pleasure more than Lovers of God,’ Edinburgh, 1818; edited, with an introduction, by Dr. Candlish, Edinburgh, 1867. 4. ‘Sermons on Infidelity,’ London, 1821. 5. ‘A Collection in Prose and Verse for Use in Schools,’ Edinburgh, 1823. 6. ‘Sermons on Hearing the Word,’ Edinburgh, 1825. 7. ‘The Scripture History,’ Bristol, 1826. 8. ‘Scripture History of the New Testament,’ London, 1827. 9. ‘Sermons on various Subjects,’ Edinburgh, 1829. 10. ‘Sermons and Sacramental Exhortations,’ Edinburgh, 1831. 11. ‘The Doctrine of Universal Pardon,’ Edinburgh, 1830.

 THOMSON, ANTHONY TODD (1778–1849), physician, younger son of Alexander Thomson, was born in Edinburgh, where his parents were staying temporarily, on 7 Jan. 1778. His father was postmaster-general and a member of the council of the province of Georgia, and collector of customs for the town of Savannah. Anthony returned to America with his parents soon after Anthony Todd, postmaster of Edinburgh, had stood sponsor to him as his godson; but when peace was declared after the American war, his father, in common with many American loyalists, threw up his appointments, and settled in Edinburgh with a small pension from the government. Thomson was brought up by Mrs. Rennie, who afterwards became his stepmother. He was educated at the high school, and was nominated, by his godfather's interest, to a clerkship in the Edinburgh post office. He graduated doctor of medicine at the university of Edinburgh in 1799, and in November of the same year he became a member of the Royal Medical Society. He had previously been admitted a member of the Speculative Society, 27 Feb. 1798, and there formed a lifelong friendship with Lord Brougham, having already gained the affection of Henry (afterwards Lord) Cockburn.

He left Edinburgh in 1800, after the death of his father, and settled as a general practitioner in Sloane Street, London, where he eventually acquired a very large practice. He was admitted a member of the College of Surgeons of London in 1800. In March 1812 he was instrumental in founding the Chelsea, Brompton, and Belgrave Dispensary, which is still a useful institution, and to his exertions was due the establishment of an infant school in the parish of St. Luke's, Chelsea. In 1814 Thomson became, with George Man Burrows [q. v.] and William Royston, an editor of 'The Medical Repository,' to the pages of which he contributed many articles.

He left Chelsea in 1826, was admitted a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and took a house in Hinde Street, Manchester Square. In 1828 he was elected the first professor of materia medica and therapeutics at the newly founded London University (now University College), and in 1832, on the death of John Gordon Smith [q. v.], he was appointed with Andrew Amos [q. v.] joint professor of medical jurisprudence. In 1837 Amos was appointed a member of the governor-general's council in India, and Thomson became the sole professor, and so continued until his death. He was also a physician to the dispensary attached to University College, which has since become the University College and North London Hospital. He was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1842, and he was then living in Welbeck Street. His health broke down from continued mental exertion in 1835, and he was compelled during the remainder of his life to relax his earlier labours, though he continued to practise, and devoted much attention to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the skin.

He died at Ealing on 3 July 1849, and is buried in Perivale churchyard. His fine collection of specimens of materia medica, with many illustrative drawings, was purchased by the government after Thomson's death for the use of Queen's College, Cork. He was twice married: first, in 1801, to Christina Maxwell, by whom he had issue one son and two daughters; and, she dying in 1820, he married, in the same year, Katharine, daughter of Thomas Byerley [see ]. He had three sons, including Henry William (Byerley) Thomson [q. v.] and five daughters by his second marriage.

Thomson's lectures on botany at the Pharmaceutical Society and in the gardens of the Royal Botanical Society did much to extend the teaching of this subject to medical students. He was a firm believer in the efficacy of drugs in the treatment of disease, and he was a plain but agreeable lecturer. He carried on some original research in connection


text:
Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/528

470 Thursday, May 4. We had constant rain, lightning and thunder last night. This morning, at the dawn of day, the captain and all hands were at work, and succeeded in removing the boat several hundred yards below where she had struck; but unfortunately we got fast again before we could reach deep water, and all the exertions to get off were renewed, and at this moment, almost nine, we have a line fastened to the shore and expect to be afloat in a short time. But I fear that we shall lose most of the day before we leave this shallow, intricate, and dangerous channel. At ten o'clock we found ourselves in deep water, near the shore on the west side. We at once had the men at work cutting wood, which was principally that of ash-trees of moderate size, which wood was brought on board in great quantities and lengths. Thank Heaven, we are off in a few minutes, and I hope will have better luck. I saw on the shore many "Gopher" hills, in all probability the same as I have drawn. Bell shot a Gray Squirrel which I believe to be the same as our Sciurus carolinensis. Friend Harris shot two or three birds, which we have not yet fully established, and Bell shot one Lincoln's Finch —strange place for it, when it breeds so very far north as Labrador. Caught a Woodpecker, and killed a Catbird, Water-thrush, seventeen Parrakeets, a Yellow Chat, a new Finch, and very curious, two White-throated Finches, one White-crown, a Yellow-rump Warbler, a Gray

title: Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/528


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/242

 with the composition and properties of the alkaloids and iodides, the value of which was duly recognised by his admission to several learned societies both here and abroad, while his liberal cast of mind enabled him to take an active part in obtaining the apothecaries' act of 1815. He was one of the earliest supporters of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, and he assisted in founding the Pathological Society of London.

His works are: 1. ‘The Conspectus Pharmacopœiæ,’ 8vo, London, 1810. This work was a commentary upon the Pharmacopœiæ of the London, Dublin, and Edinburgh Colleges of Physicians, to which in the later editions published in America the United States Pharmacopœia was added. The fifteenth edition was issued by Messrs. Longman in 1845, and it was adapted to the ‘British Pharmacopœia’ of 1885 by Professor Nestor Tirard, M.D., in 1887. The seventh American edition was issued at New York by Messrs. S. S. & W. Wood, 12mo, 1862. It was translated into German (Leipzig, 1827), and the appendix on poisons was again translated, and was published at Aachen in 1846. 2. ‘The London Dispensatory: a Practical Synopsis of Materia Medica, Pharmacy, and Therapeutics,’ 8vo, London, 1811. The eleventh edition was issued in 1852. It was translated into French (Paris, 1827). The work is one of great erudition, containing an immense amount of information admirably put together in an easy and lucid manner. It is illustrated by a great number of original experiments and observations. It was written in the intervals of a large practice. 3. ‘Lectures on the Elements of Botany,’ vol. i., with plates, 8vo, London, 1822. The lectures were delivered in ‘Tait's Gardens,’ Chelsea, and afterwards in the room formerly occupied by Joshua Brookes [q. v.] in Blenheim Street, Oxford Street. The work sold badly, so the first volume was alone published. 4. ‘Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics,’ 2 vols. 8vo, London, 1832; 3rd edit. 1843. 5. ‘Medical Statement of the case of the Princess Charlotte of Wales,’ 8vo, London, 1817. He edited: 1. ‘The London Medical Repository,’ vols. i–viii. 1814–17. 2. Bateman's ‘Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Diseases,’ 7th edit. 8vo, 1829. 3. ‘The Seasons,’ by James Thomson, with notes philosophical, classical, historical, and biographical, London, 1847, 16mo. He translated ‘The Philosophy of Magic, Prodigies, and Apparent Miracles,’ by A. J. Eusèbe Baconnière Salverte, London, 1846, 8vo, 2 vols., a work dealing with the same subject as Sir David Brewster's ‘Letters on Natural Magic.’

[Lancet, 1849, ii. 46; a Memoir of Anthony Todd Thomson, privately printed in 1850; information from Colonel W. Johnston, C.B.]  THOMSON, CHARLES EDWARD POULETT, (1799–1841), governor-general of Canada, was third son of John Poulett Thomson, a London merchant, by his wife Charlotte, daughter of John Jacob, a physician of Salisbury. George Julius Poulett Scrope [q. v.] was his elder brother. He was born at Waverley Abbey, Wimbledon, Surrey, on 13 Sept. 1799, and educated at private schools. In 1815 he was sent to St. Petersburg to begin business life in a branch of his father's firm. Two years later he left Russia on account of ill-health, and spent the two succeeding years in Italy and other parts of the continent. From 1819 to 1821 he was occupied in the London counting-house, and from 1821 to 1823 he was again in Russia, after which he settled ultimately in London. Taking a keen interest in politics, particularly in financial and commercial questions, he was returned to parliament for Dover on 19 June 1826, Jeremy Bentham assisting personally in the canvass. On 28 May 1828 he introduced a bill for a repeal of the usury laws, and was subsequently a frequent and effective speaker on free-trade and other proposals for financial reform. On the formation of Earl Grey's ministry in 1830 he was appointed vice-president of the board of trade and treasurer of the navy, and then withdrew from the commercial firm with which he was connected. He accompanied Lord Durham to Paris in November 1831 to negotiate a new commercial treaty with France, but the project fell through. In 1832 he carried out large improvements in the customs duties. At the general election that year, being elected simultaneously for Dover and Manchester, he chose the latter seat, which had been secured without solicitation on his part. He was re-elected for Manchester several times in succeeding years, his opponent in 1837 being Gladstone. In the new government he again occupied his former position at the board of trade, and in 1834 succeeded Lord Auckland as president. He continued his alterations and remissions in the customs, assisted materially in framing the Bank Charter and Factories Regulation Acts of 1833, and greatly improved commercial relations by treaty with many foreign countries. He failed in an attempt to persuade America and France to admit the principle of international copyright. In 1832 he organised a special statistical department at the board of trade, and in 1837 instituted the school of design at Somerset


text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Fichel, Eugène

FICHEL,, (1826-95). A French painter, born in Paris. He was a pupil of Paul Delaroche. His first work of importance was exhibited in 1850, “Harvey Demonstrating the Circulation of the Blood to Charles I.” Fichel has the miniature style of Meissonier, great care in finish, archæological exactness, and a kind of delicate humor. Among his numerous

works are: “A Morning Call” (1855); “The Arrival at the Inn” (1863), in the Luxembourg; “The Foundation of the French Academy” (1872); “The End of Dinner” (1872); and “The Council of War” (1890).


text: Page:A History of Horncastle from the Earliest Period to the Present Time.djvu/16


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/243

 House, in accordance with the recommendation of a select committee of the House of Commons made in 1835.

Thomson found in 1836 that his official labours, combined with the long night sittings of the House of Commons, seriously affected his health. In consequence in August 1839 he accepted the post of governor-general of Canada. His administration began at a critical period in Canadian history, and his first duty was to carry out the policy suggested in the report of his predecessor, Lord Durham [see, first ], by effecting a union of the provinces and establishing a new constitution for their future government. This delicate and difficult task, in which the diverse interests of the Upper and Lower Provinces had to be reconciled, was accomplished by Thomson with great skill and courage. The new constitution, after being carried through the colonial parliaments and ratified by the House of Commons, came into force on 10 Feb. 1841. It led ultimately to the great confederation of 1867. In addition to this measure he carried another for local government, and he set on foot improvements in the matters of emigration, education, and public works. In recognition of his services he was on 19 Aug. 1840 raised to the peerage as Baron Sydenham of Sydenham in Kent and Toronto in Canada, and was appointed knight grand cross of the order of the Bath. When preparing to return home he met with a fatal accident on 4 Sept. 1841 while riding near Kingston, and died, unmarried, at his residence, Alwington House, Kingston, on the 19th of the same month. He was buried at Kingston. Charles Greville, in his ‘Memoirs,’ devotes a curious passage to Thomson's complacency. In spite of his vanity he had many admirable qualities: tact, judgment, and prudence, firmness and decision, indefatigable and well-ordered application, and, above all, a disinterested devotion to the service of his country. Some rather ill-natured observations on Thomson are given in Sir John Bowring's ‘Autobiographical Recollections’ (p. 301, 1877).

His portrait, by S. W. Reynolds, painted in 1833, appeared in the third Exhibition of National Portraits, 1868. It was then in possession of his brother, George Poulett Scrope, and was engraved in his memoir of Sydenham.

[Memoirs of Charles, Lord Sydenham, by his brother, G. Poulett Scrope, 1843; Gent. Mag. 1841, ii. 650; Athenæum, 29 July, 5 Aug. 1843; Greville Memoirs, ii. 219, iii. 330; Burke's Dormant and Extinct Peerage, 1866, p. 531; Winsor's Hist. of America, 1889, viii. 162; Todd's Parliamentary Government in the British Colonies, 1880, p. 55; Walpole's Life of Lord J. Russell, 1889; Prentice's Hist. of the Anti-Corn Law League, 1853, i. 20; Réveillaud, Histoire du Canada, p. 374 (adverse view of Thomson).]  THOMSON, CHARLES WYVILLE (1830–1882), naturalist, son of Andrew Thomson, surgeon in the East India Company's service, was born at Bonsyde, Linlithgow, on 5 March 1830. His baptismal name was Wyville Thomas Charles, and the change was formally made when he was gazetted as knight. He was educated first at Merchiston Castle school, and then at the university of Edinburgh, attending the classes in medicine. His aptitude for natural science showed first in the direction of botany, and was so marked that in 1850 he was appointed lecturer on botany at King's College, Aberdeen, and in the following year professor in the same subject at Marischal College. But in 1853 his field of work was enlarged by his appointment to the chair of natural history in Queen's College, Cork, and by his removal in the following year to that of mineralogy and geology at Queen's College, Belfast, where, in 1860, he was transferred to the professorship of natural science. To this post in 1868 was added that of professor of botany to the Royal College of Science, Dublin. His last removal was in 1870 to the professorship of natural history in the university of Edinburgh.

Some years before he had turned his mind to questions relating to the distribution of life and the physical conditions in the deeper parts of the ocean, to which attention had already been directed by Dr. G. C. Wallich, who in 1860 accompanied the Bulldog in a sounding voyage across the North Atlantic. Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter [q. v.] was also keenly interested in similar questions, and ultimately the matter was taken up by the Royal Society, with the result that in the summer of 1868 the two naturalists, on board the gunboat Lightning, made a series of investigations to the north of Scotland as far as the Faroe Islands. The work was continued in the following year, with the aid of John Gwyn Jeffreys [q. v.], on board her majesty's ship Porcupine, off the west coast of Ireland, in the Bay of Biscay, and to the north of Scotland, and an expedition was made to the Mediterranean in 1870, which Thomson, owing to an illness, could not accompany. He described the general results of these researches in a volume published in 1873, and entitled ‘The Depths of the Sea.’

These cruises, however, were only preliminary to an investigation on a much more extended scale. They had proved so fruitful and suggestive that the government was


text:
Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/529

Rh , a Loon, and two Rough-winged Swallows. We saw Cerulean Warblers, Hooded Flycatchers, Kentucky Warblers, Nashville ditto, Blue-winged ditto, Red-eyed and White-eyed Flycatchers, Great-crested and Common Pewees, Redstarts, Towhee Buntings, Ferruginous Thrushes, Wood Thrush, Golden-crowned Thrush, Blue-gray Flycatcher, Blue-eyed Warbler, Blue Yellow-back, Chestnut-sided, Black-and-White Creepers, Nuthatch, Kingbirds, Red Tanagers, Cardinal Grosbeaks, common House Wren, Blue-winged Teals, Swans, large Blue Herons, Crows, Turkey-buzzards, and a Peregrine Falcon, Red-tailed Hawks, Red-headed, Red-bellied, and Golden-winged Woodpeckers, and Partridges. Also, innumerable "Gopher" hills, one Ground-hog, one Rabbit, two Wild Turkeys, one Whippoorwill, one Maryland Yellow-throat, and Swifts. We left the shore with a strong gale of wind, and after having returned to our proper channel, and rounded the island below our troublesome situation of last night, we were forced to come to under the main shore. Here we killed and saw all that is enumerated above, as well as two nests of the White-headed Eagle. We are now for the night at a wooding-place, where we expect to purchase some fresh provisions, if any there are; and as it is nine o'clock I am off to bed. Friday, May 5. The appearance of the weather this morning was rather bad; it was cloudy and lowering, but instead of rain we have had a strong southwesterly wind to contend with, and on this account our day's work does not amount to much. At this moment, not eight o'clock, we have stopped through its influence.

At half-past twelve we reached the Black Snake Hills

title: Page:Audubon and His Journals.djvu/529


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/244

Thomson strongly urged by the leading men of science in Great Britain to send out a roomy and well-equipped vessel, in order to make a series of soundings and dredgings in the three great ocean basins, to ascertain the temperature and character of the water, to collect specimens of the fauna and flora on the surface and from all possible depths, and to study as far as possible certain rarely visited oceanic islands—in fact, to make a somewhat devious voyage of circumnavigation, which was expressly guided by the desire to increase scientific knowledge. The Challenger, a corvette of 2,306 tons, was specially fitted up and placed under command of Captain (now Sir George) Nares, with a naval surveying staff. Thomson, who had been granted leave of absence by his university, was appointed chief of the civilian scientific staff (six in number), and the vessel left Sheerness on 7 Dec. 1872. They crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Isles to the West Indies, when after skirting its American side as far north as Halifax they recrossed to Madeira by the Azores. Then they sailed southward of the Cape de Verde Islands and St. Paul's Rocks to Fernando Noronha and the Brazil coast, crossing the southern Atlantic by way of Tristan da Cunha to the Cape of Good Hope. From this they made for the Antarctic Ocean by way of the Crozets and Kerguelen land, and reached the ice-pack a little south of the Antarctic circle, beyond which it was unsafe to venture in an ordinary vessel. Thence they proceeded to Australia, and after touching at Melbourne and Sydney, sailed for Fiji. A devious course took them through the Australasian islands, and they then visited Japan and the Sandwich Islands. After sailing due south to the tropic of Capricorn, they took an easterly course to Valparaiso, and made their way into the southern Atlantic through the Magellan Strait. After calling at Montevideo they visited the Canaries, and returned to England by a variation of their former route, arriving at Spithead on 24 May 1876, having travelled in this remarkable voyage 68,890 nautical miles, and having made observations by soundings at 362 stations. An enormous mass of material had been obtained for study, and Thomson (who received the honour of knighthood on his return) was appointed director of the Challenger expedition commission to superintend the arrangement of the collections and the publication of the results at the public expense. He also resumed his university duties, delivered the Rede lecture at Cambridge in 1877, and in the following year presided over the geographical section at the meeting of the British Association in Dublin. But he had undertaken more than his constitution could bear. He was struck down by an illness in the summer of 1879, which prevented him from resuming his lectures, and he died at his house, Bonsyde, near Linlithgow, on 10 March 1882. He married, in 1853, Jane Ramage, eldest daughter of Adam Dawson, of Bonnytown, Linlithgowshire, who survived him. Their only son, Frank Wyville Thomson, became surgeon-captain in the 3rd Bengal cavalry.

Thomson received the following honorary degrees: LL.D. of Aberdeen, 1853, LL.D. 1860, and D.Sc. 1871, of the Queen's University, Ireland; LL.D. Dublin, 1878, and Ph.D. Jena. He was elected F.R.S.E. 1855, M.R.I.A. 1861, F.R.S. 1869, and was a fellow of the Linnean, Geological, Zoological, and other societies, besides receiving the honorary membership of various scientific bodies, colonial and foreign. He was awarded a royal medal in 1876, and in 1877 was created a knight of the Polar Star when a delegate from the university of Edinburgh to that of Upsala, on the occasion of their quater-centenary.

Thomson's more important papers, including official reports, are about forty-five in number. They deal with varied subjects, but the majority treat of echinids, crinoids, or other echinoderms, for he made this class his special study. Besides these he wrote two books, ‘The Depths of the Sea,’ already mentioned, and ‘The Voyage of the Challenger in the Atlantic,’ 2 vols. 1877. The latter gave a general account of the results of the exploration of the Atlantic. His illness prevented him from continuing the publication of the results of the expedition, and the heavy task was undertaken in the beginning of 1881 by Dr. John Murray, a member of the civilian staff. The series of volumes was completed in about thirteen years.

A marble bust of Wyville Thomson is in the university of Edinburgh, and a memorial window was erected to his memory in the cathedral of Linlithgow.

[Proceedings of the Linnean Soc. 1881–2, p. 67; Transactions of the Edinburgh Botan. Soc. xiv. 278; Quarterly Journ. Geol. Soc. 1882, Proc. p. 40; Reports of Challenger, Zoology, vol. iv. (1882); information from Dr. John Murray.]  THOMSON, DAVID (1817–1880), professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen, eldest son of David Thomson, merchant of Leghorn, was born at Leghorn on 17 Nov. 1817. Receiving his school education in Italy and Switzerland, he entered the university of Glasgow in 1832 and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1836, graduating


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lucas, Frederick


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lucas, Henry (d.1663)


text:
Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/245

 B.A. in 1839 and M.A. in 1845. His mathematical powers were freely recognised, but the state of his health barred his chance of distinction.

In 1840 he became professor-substitute (for William Meikleham) of natural philosophy in the university of Glasgow, and that position he held until, in 1845, he was appointed professor of natural philosophy and one of the regents in the university and King's College, Aberdeen. He was sub-principal of King's College from 1854 to 1860, in which year, on the union of King's and Marischal colleges, he became professor of natural philosophy in the reconstituted university of Aberdeen. He died in office on 31 Jan. 1880, leaving a widow, a son, and three daughters.

‘Davie’ Thomson was known to two generations of Aberdeen students as an ideal teacher, and his name is inseparably connected with the high reputation which the university at one time possessed for mathematical scholarship. His lectures, while strictly scientific in method, were lightened by the free play of his keen and delicate humour. While still young he showed qualifications in the conduct of business which a little later rendered him the directing pilot in the somewhat troublous period of transition when the Aberdeen colleges had to be remodelled under the pressure of the demand for university extension and reform. His views, in spite of much local opposition, were in every particular adopted when the union of the colleges was finally carried out by act of parliament in 1860.

Thomson's only contribution to the literature of the subject of his chair is the article ‘Acoustics’ in the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’ In 1852 he edited the second edition of ‘Caledonia Romana,’ by Robert Stuart, his brother-in-law.

The university of Aberdeen possesses a bust of Thomson by John Hutcheson, R.S.A., subscribed for by old students.

THOMSON, EDWARD DEAS (1800–1879), Australian official and politician, the second son of Sir John Deas Thomson, accountant-general of the navy, and of Rebecca, daughter of John Freer, was born at Edinburgh on 1 June 1800. He was educated at the high school, Edinburgh, and at Harrow, and thence went for two years to a college at Caen. Returning to London, he prepared for a mercantile career, and in the meantime assisted his father with the public accounts in a semi-official capacity. In 1826 he made a journey to the United States to look after a brother's affairs, and afterwards travelled through the States and Canada.

In 1827 Thomson was appointed by the influence of [q. v.] clerk of the council of New South Wales, arriving in Sydney in December 1828. He won the favour of the governor, Sir [q. v.], who in 1837 appointed Thomson to be colonial secretary and registrar of deeds, and a member of the executive and legislative councils. The appointment has been denounced as a job (, History of Australia, ii. 175), but Thomson proved himself fully equal to his new post, and when in 1843 he became leader of the house, he astonished his friends by his capacity and tact (ib. ii. 304). He was chairman of the committee on transportation in 1849, took a prominent part in regulating the early goldfields, and in framing an electoral act prior to the change of the constitution (1851). As adviser to Governor Sir [q. v.], he was for a time the most powerful man in New South Wales. His views on fiscal subjects were pronounced, and he is credited with having founded the present fiscal system of the colony. Early in 1854 he was granted two years' leave on the ground of ill-health, but at the same time he was appointed with [q. v.] to watch the progress through the House of Commons of the bill creating a new constitution for New South Wales. In 1855 he acted as commissioner for the colony at the Paris exhibition. On 24 Jan. 1856, soon after his return, he was requested to form the first government under a responsible constitution, but declined, and took a seat in the ministry of Sir [q. v.] as vice-president of the legislative council, retiring on 6 June on a large pension from his office of colonial secretary. He was at this time presented by the colonists with a service of plate and a purse of 1,000l. The latter he devoted to founding a scholarship in Sydney University. In 1857 Thomson brought forward in the legislative council a motion for the federation of Australia, which may give him a title to be considered the father of modern ideas on this subject (Official History of New South Wales, p. 280).

In 1861 he resigned his seat in council, with several colleagues, in order to checkmate the effort of the Cowper ministry to pack the council with their own followers,


text:
The New International Encyclopædia/Fichet, Guillaume

FICHET', fḗ'shắ',. A French scholar of the fifteenth century. In 1467 he was elected rector of the University of Paris, and he installed in the Sorbonne the first printing-press ever set up in France, with the aid of three printers who came from Mainz to assist him in this work. The first book printed was Lettres de Gasparino (1470). Some of Fichet's own books followed, such as Ficheti Guilielmi Artium et Theologiæ Doctoris, Rhetoricorum Libri III. (1470). Consult Phillipe, Guillaume Fichet, sa ''vie et ses œuvres. Introduction de l'imprimerie'' à Paris (Annecy, 1892).


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lucas, Henry (fl.1795)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lucas, Horatio Joseph


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lucas, James