HALL, JAMES, D.D. (1755–1826), presbyterian divine, was born at Cathcart, near Glasgow, on 5 Jan. 1755. His parents belonged to the middle class, and were zealous adherents of the secession church. From his father, who died in his infancy, was obtained the feu on which was built the meeting-house of Shuttle Street, afterwards Greyfriars, Glasgow, the earliest secession congregation in the city. His mother presented the seceders of Kirkintilloch with land which she owned there for a meeting-house and manse, and to her James and his brother Robert, afterwards minister of the secession church in Kelso, owed their early training. Hall studied in the university of Glasgow, under Professors Young, Jardine, and Dr. Thomas Reid, and finally proceeded to the theological course under John Brown (1722–1787) of Haddington [q. v.] In the spring of 1776 he was licensed to preach by the associate presbytery of Glasgow. An offer of a good living in the established church was rejected with scorn, and on 16 April 1777 he was ordained pastor of the associate congregation at Cumnock. A call to the congregation of Wells Street, London, in 1780 was set aside by the synod, which then decided calls to ordained ministers; but on 15 June 1786 Hall was translated to the congregation of Rose Street, which had seceded from the first associate congregation in Edinburgh. In 1800 he declined a call to Manchester.
Hall took a high place as a preacher and minister, while his general intelligence and polished manners gave him good standing in Edinburgh society. The meeting-house in Rose Street was filled to overflowing, and a more spacious church was erected in Broughton Place in 1820–1. In 1792 a pulpit gown was presented to him, but the use of such robes was distasteful to strict seceders, and a few of his hearers left. He died on 20 Nov. 1826, and was buried in the New Calton cemetery, in a tomb purchased by the congregation. A marble tablet was placed in the lobby of the church.
From 1786 onwards Hall was always conspicuous on the side of progress in the religious movements of his time. His knowledge of business, ready utterance, and combination of suavity and dignity made him a useful member of ecclesiastical courts. He encouraged bible and missionary societies, and was chairman of the committee which, on 8 Sept. 1820, brought about a union among seceders after a separation of more than seventy years.
[History of Broughton Place Church, 1872, including biographical sketch appended to funeral sermon on Hall by the Rev. John Brown; private information.]
HALL, Sir JAMES (1761–1832), geologist and chemist, the first geologist directly to apply the test of laboratory experiment to geological hypotheses, was born in 1761, being the eldest son of Sir John, third baronet of Dunglass, Haddingtonshire, by Magdalen, daughter of Sir Robert Pringle, bart. Hall succeeded to the baronetcy in 1776. His attention turned early to geological questions: he became intimate with James Hutton and his exponent Playfair, and relates how, after three years' argument with Hutton, he adopted the leading principles of his system. These he tested by careful study of the rocks in various parts of Scotland, in the Alps, in Italy, and in Sicily. During his travels, from which he returned in 1785, he also paid considerable attention to architecture. He was anxious to test the objections of the Neptunist followers of Werner to Hutton's Plutonist views by experiment, believing with Paracelsus that ‘Vulcan is a second nature, imitating concisely what the first takes time and circuit to effect.’ Hutton, however, objected ‘to judge of the great operations of the mineral kingdom from having kindled a fire and looked into the bottom of a little crucible,’ so Hall postponed the publication of any of his results until after his friend's death in 1797. In a series of memoirs communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he was president, he showed, in opposition to the Wernerians, that basalt and even bottle-glass, when fused and very slowly cooled, became stony and crystalline, and not glassy; that carbonate of lime, when heated under pressure, was not burnt into quicklime, but became a crystalline marble; and that the vertical position and convolutions of strata in the neighbourhood of granite have been produced by its intrusion in a molten state causing lateral pressure. He gave a true account of the formation of volcanic cones as illustrated by Vesuvius, but he followed De Saussure and Pallas, in opposition to Hutton and Playfair, in attributing to a great sea-flood or ‘débâcle’ the presence of boulders on the Jura and similar phenomena at Corstorphine which we now recognise as glacial. In 1797 he laid before the Royal Society of Edinburgh an interesting introductory ‘Essay on the Origin and Principles of Gothic Architecture,’ of twenty-seven pages, with six plates and a coloured frontispiece, which he issued in an enlarged form in 1813 as an ‘Essay on the Origin, History, and Principles of Gothic Architecture,’ extending to 150 pages, with sixty plates. He argues in detail that Gothic architecture began in the reproduction in stone
