to the bar in 1832. In 1839 he was appointed sheriff-substitute of Lanarkshire, and in 1867 he succeeded Sir Archibald Alison in the post of sheriff-principal of the county, an office which he filled with distinguished success. In 1831 he published Summer and Winter Hours, a volume of poems, of which the best known is that on Mary, queen of Scots. He further defended the cause of the unfortunate queen in a prose Life (2 vols., 1828–1831). Among his other works may be mentioned a preface which he wrote to Bell and Bains’s edition (1865) of the works of Shakespeare, and Romances and Minor Poems (1866). He figures in the society of the Noctes Ambrosianae as “Tallboys.” He died on the 7th of January 1874.
BELL, JACOB (1810–1859), British pharmaceutical chemist, was born in London on the 5th of March 1810. On the completion of his education, he joined his father in business as a chemist in Oxford Street, and at the same time attended the chemistry lectures at the Royal Institution, and those on medicine at King’s College. Always keenly alive to the interests of chemists in general, Bell conceived the idea of a society which should at once protect the interests of the trade, and improve its status, and at a public meeting held on the 15th of April 1841, it was resolved to found the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. Bell carried his scheme through in the face of many difficulties, and further advanced the cause of pharmacy by establishing the Pharmaceutical Journal, and superintending its publication for eighteen years. The Pharmaceutical Society was incorporated by royal charter in 1843. One of the first abuses to engage the attention of the new body was the practice of pharmacy by unqualified persons, and in 1845 Bell drew up the draft of a bill to deal with the matter, one of the provisions of which was the recognition of the Pharmaceutical Society as the governing body in all questions connected with pharmacy. For some time after this the question of pharmaceutical legislation was widely discussed. In 1850 Bell successfully contested the borough of St Albans in order that he might be able to advocate his proposals for reform more effectually in parliament. In 1851 he brought forward a bill embodying these proposals. It passed its second reading, but was considerably whittled down in committee, and when eventually it became law it only partially represented its sponsor’s intentions. Bell was the author of an Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain. He died on the 12th of June 1859.
BELL, JOHN (1691–1780), Scottish traveller, was born at Antermony in Scotland in 1691, and educated for the medical profession, in which he took the degree of M.D. In 1714 he set out for St Petersburg, where, through the introduction of a countryman, he was nominated medical attendant to Valensky, recently appointed to the Persian embassy, with whom he travelled from 1715 to 1718. The next four years he spent in an embassy to China, passing through Siberia and the great Tatar deserts. He had scarcely rested from this last journey when he was summoned to attend Peter the Great in his perilous expedition to Derbend and the Caspian Gates. The narrative of this journey he enriched with interesting particulars of the public and private life of that remarkable prince. In 1738 he was sent by the Russian government on a mission to Constantinople, to which, accompanied by a single attendant who spoke Turkish, he proceeded in the midst of winter and all the horrors of war, returning in May to St Petersburg. It appears that after this he was for several years established as a merchant at Constantinople, where he married in 1746. In the following year he retired to his estate of Antermony, where he spent the remainder of his life. He died in 1780. His travels, published at Glasgow in 1763, were speedily translated into French, and widely circulated in Europe.
BELL, JOHN (1763–1820), Scottish anatomist and surgeon, an elder brother of Sir Charles Bell, was born at Edinburgh on the 12th of May 1763. After completing his professional education at Edinburgh, he carried on from 1790 in Surgeons’ Square an anatomical lecture-theatre, where, in spite of much opposition, due partly to the unconservative character of his teaching, he attracted large audiences by his lectures, in which he was for a time assisted by his younger brother Charles. In 1793–1795 he published Discourses on the Nature and Cure of Wounds, and in 1800 he became involved in an unfortunate controversy with James Gregory (1753–1821), the professor of medicine at Edinburgh. Gregory in 1800 attacked the system whereby the fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh acted in rotation as surgeons at the Royal Infirmary, with the result that the younger fellows were excluded. Bell, who was among the number, composed an Answer for the Junior Members (1800), and ten years later published a collection of Letters on Professional Character and Manners, which he had addressed to Gregory. After his exclusion from the infirmary he ceased to lecture and devoted himself to study and practice. In 1816 he was injured by a fall from his horse and in the following year went to Italy for the benefit of his health. He died at Rome on the 15th of April 1820. His works also included Principles of Surgery (1801), Anatomy of the Human Body, which went through several editions and was translated into German, and Observations on Italy, published by his widow in 1825.
BELL, JOHN (1797–1869), American political leader, was born near Nashville, Tennessee, on the 15th of February 1797. He graduated at the university of Nashville in 1814, and in 1817 was elected to the state senate, but retiring after one term, he devoted himself for ten years to the study and the practice of the law. From 1827 until 1841 he was a member of the national House of Representatives, of which from June 1834 to March 1835 he was the speaker, and in which he was conspicuous as a debater and a conservative leader. Though he entered political life as a Democrat, he became estranged from his party’s leader, President Jackson, also a Tennessean, and after 1835 was one of the leaders of the Whig party in the South. In March 1841 he became the secretary of war in President Harrison’s cabinet, but in September, after the death of Harrison and the rupture between the Whig leaders and President Tyler, he resigned this position. From 1847 until 1859 he was a member of the United States Senate, and attracted attention by his ability in debate and his political independence, being one of two Southern senators to vote against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 and against the admission of Kansas with the Lecompton or pro-slavery constitution in 1858. Strongly conservative by temperament and devoted to the Union, he ardently desired to prevent the threatened secession of the Southern states in 1860, and was the candidate, for the presidency, of the Constitutional Union Party, often called from the names of its candidates for the presidency and the vice-presidency (Edward Everett) the “Bell and Everett Party,” which was made up largely of former Whigs and Southern “Know-Nothings,” opposed sectionalism, and strove to prevent the disruption of the union. The party adopted no platform, and discarding all other issues, resolved that “it is both the part of patriotism and of duty to recognize no political principle other than the constitution of the country, the union of the states, and the enforcement of the laws.” Bell was defeated, but received a popular vote of 587,830 (mostly cast in the Southern states), and obtained the electoral votes of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee—39 altogether, out of a total of 303. Bell tried earnestly to prevent the secession of his own state, but after the issue of President Lincoln’s proclamation of the 15th of April 1861 calling on the various states for volunteers, his efforts were unavailing, and when Tennessee joined the Confederacy Bell “went with his state.” He took no part in the Civil War, and died on the 10th of September 1869.
BELL, ROBERT (1800–1867), Irish man of letters, was born at Cork on the 16th of January 1800. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was one of the founders of the Dublin Historical Society. In 1828 he settled in London, where he edited a weekly paper, the Atlas, and until 1841 was engaged in journalism; and afterwards in miscellaneous literary work. He died on the 12th of April 1867. His most important work is his annotated edition of the English Poets (24 vols., 1854–1857; new ed., 29 vols., 1866), the works of each poet being prefaced by a memoir. For Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia he wrote: History of Russia (3 vols., 1836–1838); Lives of English Poets (2 vols.,
