science occupies the attention of several distinguished professors. De Blainville, by this appointment, was treading closely on the heels of his great master; and when Cuvier died in 1832, he was placed in the chair of comparative anatomy, and at the head of the museum. Thus, in twenty-eight years, he had worked his way from the condition of an artist, without fame or promise, to that of the highest scientific position in France. Whilst working his way to this high position, he contributed above two hundred works and papers to the literature of zoology and comparative anatomy. In 1816 he published a prodromus of a new methodical arrangement of the animal kingdom, in which he indicated many of those changes in classification which he subsequently adopted, and which now constitute a part of the systematic arrangements of modern writers on zoology. He was a contributor to the Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle; and in the articles which he has written in that work, he has put forth much new matter, and many of his peculiar views. He also contributed papers to the Bulletin de la Societe Philomatique, the Annales and Memoires du Museum; the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, the Revue Zoologique, and other scientific periodicals. In 1822 he produced his "Principles of Comparative Anatomy," in two volumes, and in 1833 his "Course of General and Comparative Physiology," in three volumes, appeared. In 1836 he published a "Manual of Actinology and Zoophytology." His greatest work, and that to which he devoted the largest amount of labour, is his "Osteographie." This work, of which twenty-four parts had been published on the death of its author, was devoted to a description, with illustrations, of the skeletons and teeth in the five classes of vertebrate animals, both recent and fossil. The success of this work was not like that of Cuvier's Ossemeus Fossiles, as, although it contained an account of recent as well as fossil skeletons, it wanted the novelty of a large number of new forms, and the enunciation of a great principle or discovery, which gave so much eclat to the celebrated work of Cuvier. De Blainville died on the 1st of May, 1850. He had lectured as usual the day before his death, and gone to see a sick niece at Rouen, and was returning by rail to deliver his usual lecture, when, on the carriage door being opened, he was found in a state of apoplectic insensibility. All attempts at restoring him were in vain, and he died a few moments after his removal from the railway train. He was buried publicly at Pere la Chaise, and orations were pronounced over his grave by Prevost, Chevreul, and Milne-Edwards. De Blainville was a laborious and painstaking zoologist, and has left the impress of his labour upon the science of zoology. He was, however, educated at a time when the sciences of anatomy and physiology had not received the aid of microscopic investigation; and in his classification we miss the recognition of the profounder views of organization which influence modern systematists.—E. L.
BLAIR, Hugh, D.D., an eminent Scottish divine, born in 1718 at Edinburgh, where his father was a merchant, and latterly an officer of excise. Considerations respecting his delicate constitution, together with the impressions created by his precocious talents, determined his parents to educate him for the church, and accordingly, at the early age of twelve, he was entered at the university of his native city. In 1739 he took the degree of M.A.; his thesis on the occasion, which was afterwards printed, being "De Fundamentis et Obligatione Legis Naturæ." In that production he exhibited the fondness and something of the talent for moral disquisition which afterwards attracted admiration in his sermons, much in the same manner as four years previously, on the occasion of being complimented by his professor on an essay written for the logic class, he anticipated the encomiums which, after he began to lecture on belles-lettres, were bestowed on his talents for criticism. The powers of such a mind as that of Dr. Blair soon reach maturity, being dependent for a stimulus to action principally on a certain sensibility to agreeable impressions from art and life, such as may be experienced in comparatively early youth, rather than on any conflict of passions, or ardour of devotion to a particular pursuit, such as commonly awaits the dawn of manhood. Accordingly his fame, as it began early, spread rapidly. A year after obtaining license, 1741, the impression produced by his first sermons in his native city found him a patron in the earl of Leven, who presented him to the parish of Colessie in Fife. Here he was only allowed to remain a few months; the interest awakened in his behalf in Edinburgh by his first essays in preaching having successfully carried him through a competition with Mr Robert Walker, another popular clergyman, for the second charge of the church of Canongate, to which he was inducted in July, 1743. During the eleven years he spent in this church, almost a metropolitan one, if its vicinity to the city and the crowds of Edinburgh people who resorted to it in his time be considered, his popularity continued steadily to increase; the care with which, as a "moderate "divine, he avoided the inflated declamation of the "high-flying" party, and the no less anxious care with which, as an accomplished cultivator of polite literature, he eschewed the dry metaphysical discussions of his own party, having rallied round him a host of admirers, who did not remark, or perhaps were pleased to discover, that in the latter character he also avoided too frequent reference to the more peculiar doctrines of christianity. In 1754 he was translated to Lady Yester's church, Edinburgh, and four years afterwards to one of the charges of the High Church, the highest attainable position for a Scottish clergyman. Next year he contributed to the Edinburgh Review,—a periodical complete in two numbers, although supported by the talents of Hume, Robertson, and others,—an article on Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy, which, with the exception of two sermons, and some translations of passages of scripture for the psalmody of the church, was his only publication up till the year 1763, when there appeared his celebrated preface to the Poems of Ossian. In another line than that of authorship, however, he was gradually in the interval extending his literary fame. In 1759, following the example of Dr. Adam Smith, he commenced, under the patronage of the university and of the elite of Edinburgh, a course of lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres, which was so successful as to induce the town council to establish a chair of rhetoric in the university. Of this chair he was the first occupant, having been inducted to it in 1762, with a salary, furnished by the crown, of £70 a year. His lectures, after being subjected to constant revision during a period of twenty-one years, in which they were regularly delivered to the students of the university, were given to the world in 1783; and although pretending to none of the profound criticism of later treatises on the same subject, still retain a certain measure of popularity, as a clear and sometimes an ingenious exposition of the laws of rhetoric. It was in 1777, however, that having been induced to publish a volume of his sermons, the reputation of this accomplished scholar and divine reached its culminating point. The lapse of eighty years has considerably modified the opinion of his countrymen with respect to these celebrated productions; for whereas they were certainly the first sermons of a Scotch divine on which the learned but not impartial Johnson bestowed his approbation, and probably the first to be received throughout England with rapturous commendation, now they are rarely perused on either side of the Tweed, and never with enthusiasm.
With the approbation of both kingdoms, George III. conferred on the author a pension of £200 a year. His sermons, of which during his lifetime other three volumes were published, and a fifth after his death, were translated into almost every language of Europe, and by common consent the Scottish preacher was ranked among the classics of his country. His title to this last distinction, however, is now regarded as more than questionable; for however the elaborate polish of his style may occasionally remind us of the Spectator, the absence of a creative intellect apparent in all that came from his pen, forbids that we should name together Addison and Blair.
He was married in 1748 to his cousin, Katherine Bannatyne, and by her had a son and daughter, the former of whom died in infancy, and the latter when she had reached her twenty-first year. His health continued comparatively vigorous almost till within a few days of his death, which occurred on December 27th, 1799.—J. S., G.
BLAIR, James, the founder and first president of William and Mary's college at Williamsburg, Virginia, was born in Scotland about 1656, and took orders in the Scottish episcopal church. Leaving his native land on account of the unsettled state of religion there, he went to London just before the accession of James II., and was persuaded by the bishop of London to go out to Virginia as a missionary about 1685. The want of additional means of education, and especially of a body of educated clergy, had long been felt in the new settlement, and attempts had previously been made to found a college in Virginia, but without success. Dr. Blair took up the plan with great energy and determination, and chiefly by his means a subscription of £2500 was raised for the purpose; and he was sent by
