the mountains of Auvergne; and on returning home he read a paper on the Jurassic formation before the Academy of Berlin. He died at Berlin on the 4th of March 1853. Von Buch had inherited from his father a fortune more than sufficient for his wants. He was never married, and was unembarrassed by family ties. His excursions were always taken on foot, with a staff in his hand, and the large pockets of his overcoat filled with papers and geological instruments. Under this guise, the passer-by would not easily have recognized the man whom Humboldt pronounced the greatest geologist of his time.
A complete edition of his works was published at Berlin (1867–1885).
BUCHAN, EARLS OF. The earldom of Mar and Buchan was one of the seven original Scottish earldoms; later, Buchan was separated from Mar, and among the early earls of Buchan were Alexander Comyn (d. 1289), John Comyn (d. c. 1313), both constables of Scotland, and Henry Beaumont (d. 1340), who had married a Comyn. John Comyn’s wife, Isabel, was the countess of Buchan who crowned Robert the Bruce king at Scone in 1306, and was afterwards imprisoned at Berwick; not, however, in a cage hung on the wall of the castle. About 1382 Sir Alexander Stewart (d. c. 1404), the “wolf of Badenoch,” a son of King Robert II., became earl of Buchan, and the Stewarts appear to have held the earldom for about a century and a half, although not in a direct line from Sir Alexander.[1] Among the most celebrated of the Stewart earls were the Scottish regent, Robert, duke of Albany, and his son John, who was made constable of France and was killed at the battle of Verneuil in 1424. In 1617 the earldom came to James Erskine (d. 1640), a son of John Erskine, 2nd (or 7th) earl of Mar, whose wife Mary had inherited it from her father, James Douglas (d. 1601), and from that time it has been retained by the Erskines.
Perhaps the most celebrated of the later earls of Buchan was the eccentric David Steuart Erskine, 11th earl (1742–1829), a son of Henry David, 10th earl (d. 1767), and brother of Henry Erskine (q.v.), and of Thomas, Lord Erskine (q.v.). His pertinacity was instrumental in effecting a change in the method of electing Scottish representative peers, and in 1780 he succeeded in founding the Scottish Society of Antiquaries. Among his correspondents was Horace Walpole, and he wrote an Essay on the Lives of Fletcher of Saltoun and the Poet Thomson (1792), and other writings. He died at his residence at Dryburgh in April 1829, leaving no legitimate children, and was followed as 12th earl by his nephew Henry David (1783–1857), the ancestor of the present peer. The 11th earl’s natural son, Sir David Erskine (1772–1837), who inherited his father’s unentailed estates, was an antiquary and a dramatist.
BUCHAN, ELSPETH (1738–1791), founder of a Scottish religious sect known as the Buchanites, was the daughter of John Simpson, proprietor of an inn near Banff. Having quarrelled with her husband, Robert Buchan, a potter of Greenock, she settled with her children in Glasgow, where she was deeply impressed by a sermon preached by Hugh White, minister of the Relief church at Irvine. She persuaded White and others that she was a saint with a special mission, that in fact she was the woman, and White the man-child, described in Revelation xii. White was condemned by the presbytery, and the sect, which ultimately numbered forty-six adherents, was expelled by the magistrates in 1784 and settled in a farm, consisting of one room and a loft, known as New Cample in Dumfriesshire. Mrs Buchan claimed prophetic inspiration and pretended to confer the Holy Ghost upon her followers by breathing upon them; they believed that the millennium was near, and that they would not die, but be translated. It appears that they had community of wives and lived on funds provided by the richer members. Robert Burns, the poet, in a letter dated August 1784, describes the sect as idle and immoral. In 1785 White and Mrs Buchan published a Divine Dictionary, but the sect broke up on the death of its founder in spite of White’s attempts to prove that she was only in a trance. Even White was eventually undeceived. Andrew Innes, the last survivor, died in 1848.
See J. Train, The Buchanites from First to Last (Edinburgh, 1846).
BUCHAN, PETER (1790–1854), Scottish editor, was born at Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, in 1790. In 1816 he started in business as a printer at Peterhead, and was successful enough to be able eventually to retire and devote himself to the collection and editing of Scottish ballads. His Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland (1828) contained a large number of hitherto unpublished ballads, and newly discovered versions of existing ones. Another collection made by him was published by the Percy Society, under the title Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads (1845). Two unpublished volumes of Buchan’s ballad collections are in the British Museum. He died on the 19th of September 1854.
BUCHANAN, CLAUDIUS (1766–1815), English divine, was born at Cambuslang, near Glasgow, and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. He was ordained in 1795, and after holding a chaplaincy in India at Barrackpur (1797–1799) was appointed Calcutta chaplain and vice-principal of the college of Fort William. In this capacity he did much to advance Christianity and native education in India, especially by organizing systematic translations of the Scriptures. An account of his travels in the south and west of India, which added considerably to our knowledge of nature life, is given in his Christian Researches in Asia (Cambridge, 1811). After his return to England in 1808, he still took an active part in matters connected with India, and by his book entitled Colonial Ecclesiastical Establishment (London, 1813), he assisted in settling the controversy of 1813, which ended in the establishment of the Indian episcopate.
BUCHANAN, GEORGE (1506–1582), Scottish humanist, was born in February 1506. His father, a younger son of an old family, was the possessor of the farm of Moss, in the parish of Killearn, Stirlingshire, but he died at an early age, leaving his widow and children in poverty. His mother, Agnes Heriot, was of the family of the Heriots of Trabroun, Haddingtonshire, of which George Heriot, founder of Heriot’s hospital, was also a member. Buchanan is said to have attended Killearn school, but not much is known of his early education. In 1520 he was sent by his uncle, James Heriot, to the university of Paris, where, as he tells us in an autobiographical sketch, he devoted himself to the writing of verses “partly by liking, partly by compulsion (that being then the one task prescribed to youth).” In 1522 his uncle died, and Buchanan being thus unable to continue longer in Paris, returned to Scotland. After recovering from a severe illness, he joined the French auxiliaries who had been brought over by John Stewart, duke of Albany, and took part in an unsuccessful inroad into England (see the account in his Hist. of Scotland). In the following year he entered the university of St Andrews, where he graduated B.A. in 1525. He had gone there chiefly for the purpose of attending the celebrated John Major’s lectures on logic; and when that teacher removed to Paris, Buchanan followed him in 1526. In 1527 he graduated B.A., and in 1528 M.A. at Paris. Next year he was appointed regent, or professor, in the college of Sainte-Barbe, and taught there for upwards of three years. In 1529 he was elected Procurator of the “German Nation” in the university of Paris, and was re-elected four times in four successive months. He resigned his regentship in 1531, and in 1532 became tutor to Gilbert Kennedy, 3rd earl of Cassilis, with whom he returned to Scotland about the beginning of 1537.
At this period Buchanan was content to assume the same attitude towards the Church of Rome that Erasmus maintained. He did not repudiate its doctrines, but considered himself free to criticize its practice. Though he listened with interest to the arguments of the Reformers, he did not join their ranks before 1553. His first production in Scotland, when he was in Lord Cassilis’s household in the west country, was the poem Somnium, a satirical attack upon the Franciscan friars and monastic life generally. This assault on the monks was not displeasing to James V., who engaged Buchanan as tutor to one of his natural
- ↑ In August 1908, during some excavations at Dunkeld, remains were found which are supposed to be those of Alexander Stewart, the “wolf of Badenoch.”
