owing to his want of accurate philological knowledge. His method of translation consisted in identifying the words of the inscriptions with any words of similar appearance that he could discover in the dictionaries of ancient or modern Scandinavian languages, and then forcing them into some plausible meaning without regard to grammar. Even with respect to the transliteration of the characters, he rejected some of the most securely established results of former investigations, assigning, for instance, the value of A to the rune which is well known to have represented the R sound derived from an earlier Z. His unscientific procedure was criticised with severity by philologists trained in a more rigorous school, and for some years after the publication of the first volume of his work he was engaged in a fierce controversy with one of the ablest runic scholars of the time, Professor L. Wimmer. Although at a later period he showed more respect for sound scholarship, he never abandoned his loose and arbitrary methods of translation. A ludicrous illustration of the worthlessness of his principles of decipherment is afforded by his treatment of the inscription found at Brough in Westmoreland, which he declared to be written in Anglian runes, and translated in accordance with that supposition. When it was pointed out that the inscription consisted of five Greek hexameters, Stephens frankly acknowledged his blunder, though the acknowledgment involved the condemnation of nearly all that he had done in the decipherment of the inscriptions.
The bibliography of Stephens's writings in Erslev's ‘Forfatterlexicon,’ which extends only to the year 1868, fills eight closely printed pages. He was a constant contributor to many periodicals, both Scandinavian and English, including the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ and ‘Notes and Queries.’ Many of his articles and pamphlets relate to questions of political controversy, in which he was passionately interested, his antipathy to English radicalism being extremely violent. He furnished a large number of quotations, principally from the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the materials for the ‘New English Dictionary.’ It is stated that during the last years of his life he was engaged on a glossary to the old Northumbrian gospels, which has not yet (1898) been published.
Stephens was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of many learned societies in Scandinavia and England. In 1877 he received the degree of Ph.D. from the university of Upsala, and he was a knight of the orders of the Northern Star, the Dannebrog, and St. Olaf. He resigned his professorship in 1893, and died at Copenhagen on 9 Aug. 1895.
[Erslev's Forfatterlexicon, 3rd Suppl.; Nordisk Familjebok, vol. xv.; Hofberg's Svenskt Biogr. Handlexicon; Hodgkin in Archæologia Æliana, xviii. 50 ff.; Times 10 and 12 Aug. 1895; Gent. Mag. 1852, i. 162–3.]
STEPHENS, HENRY (1795–1874), agricultural writer, born at Keerpoy in Bengal on 25 July 1795, was the son of Andrew Stephens, a surgeon in the service of the East India Company, who died at Calcutta on 26 Aug. 1806. Henry returned to Scotland at an early age, and was educated at the parochial and grammar schools of Dundee and at the academy there under Thomas Duncan, subsequently professor of mathematics at St. Andrews. After spending some time at the university of Edinburgh, he in 1815 boarded himself with a Berwickshire agriculturist, ‘one of the best farmers of that well-farmed county,’ George Brown of Whitsome Hill. Here he gained that thorough and practical knowledge of agriculture which characterises his writings. After three years at Whitsome Hill, Stephens made for about a year (1818–19) an agricultural tour of the continent. In many places, he says, he was the first Briton to visit the district since the outbreak of the revolutionary wars. Shortly after his return home, in 1820, he came into possession of a farm of three hundred acres at Balmadies in Forfarshire. It was in a dilapidated condition, with no dwelling-house, and only a ruined steading. Stephens thoroughly put it in order, and introduced several improvements hitherto unknown in the district; the feeding of cattle, in small numbers, in separate hammels, and from troughs; the enclosing of sheep upon turnips by means of nets instead of hurdles; and the growing of Swedish turnips in larger proportion than other varieties. He also made use of furrow drains, filled with small stones, several years before the Deanston plan was made public by James Smith (1789–1850) [q. v.]
After managing the farm at Balmadies for some ten years, Stephens removed to the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, ultimately settling at Redbraes Cottage, Bonnington. Here at first alone, and afterwards in conjunction with other writers, James Slight, Robert Scott Burn, and William Seller, he produced that series of agricultural works of which the ‘Book of the Farm’ (Stephens's unaided work) is the best known. These books soon became popular abroad; they were translated into many continental lan-
