was induced by the flattering invitation of Prince William and Princess Mary to settle at the Hague. Here, having some time before lost his first wife, he married a Dutch lady of the name of Scott, a descendant of the house of Buccleuch, and of considerable wealth. This connection making him a free citizen of the Hague, prevented his being forcibly ejected, as a letter from the king of England had a little before demanded. With William he entered England, and in the year following was appointed bishop of Salisbury, a diocese over which he presided till his death in 1715. In parliament he was the advocate of moderate measures towards the non-jurors, and the act of toleration. By his clergy he was regarded as the most able and conscientious of prelates. His "Exposition on the Articles of the Church of England," came out in 1699, and has ever since been esteemed a standard work. But his most important work, and that on which his fame must rest, is his "History of His Own Time, from the Restoration of Charles II. to the Conclusion of the Treaty of Peace at Utrecht, in the Reign of Queen Anne."—J. W. D.
BURNETT, Gilbert T., an eminent English botanist of the present century, and formerly professor of botany at King's c ollege, London, contributed to the promotion of botanical science by his outlines of botany, which contain an introduction to the study, along with a classification of plants, and a full account of the properties and uses of plants. He promulgated some original views on botany, and made interesting physiological observations on the respiration of plants. He died young.—J. H. B.
BURNET, Jacob, an American judge, senator, and one of the pioneer settlers of that portion of the north-western territory which is now the state of Ohio, with a population of more than two millions, was born at Newark, New Jersey, February 22, 1770. He was graduated at Princeton college in 1791, was admitted to the bar in 1796, and immediately removed to Cincinnati, where he ever afterwards resided. When he came there it was a small village of log-cabins, containing perhaps 500 inhabitants. When he died the city numbered 130,000 inhabitants. Mr. Burnet frequently served in the legislature both of the territory and the state; and was elected to the senate of the United States, where he sat from 1828 to 1831. In 1847 he published "Notes on the Early Settlement of the North-western Territory." He died at Cincinnati in 1853.—F. B.
BURNETT, James, Lord Monboddo, an eminent Scottish judge, and ardent defender of the literature and philosophy of the ancients, was descended from an ancient family in Kincardineshire. He was born at the family seat of Monboddo, near Fordoun, in 1714. He received the rudiments of his education at the parish school of Laurencekirk, studied the usual branches of literature and science at King's college, Aberdeen, and civil law at Groningen. In 1738 he was admitted to the Scotch bar, where he rose to eminence, and particularly distinguished himself In the famous Douglas case, in which he was on the side of the Douglas family, which gained the suit. In 1767 he was promoted to the bench. As a lawyer he was upright and painstaking, and his decisions were sound, and supported by great learning and acuteness. In 1745, when the rebellion interrupted the business of the law courts, he proceeded to London, where he mingled with the eminent literary men of the age. In 1773 appeared his volumes "On the Origin and Progress of Language," a work in which great learning is combined with numberless paradoxes and eccentricities. His grand aim in this treatise is to assert the superiority of ancient above modern literature. His "Ancient Metaphysics," in which he maintains the superiority of ancient philosophy, is in six quarto volumes, published at various periods from 1779 to 1799. The first two volumes and the last are full of erudition, to which there was nothing equal in Scotland in that age. His greatest absurdities appear in his view of the history of man and of language. He maintains that man at first walked on all fours; that he then learned to walk upright, as may be seen in the ourang-outang, which he declared to be of the human race; and in due time made use of his hands, and acquired the art of swimming. At his country seat he acted the farmer, and lived on terms of great familiarity with the people on his estate. It was at this place that he received Samuel Johnson on his tour through Scotland. In Boswell's graphic account of the intercourse of the two. Lord Monboddo appears in by no means a disadvantageous light. He died in 1799.—J. M'C.
BURNET, Thomas, D.D., born at Croft, near Darlington, about the year 1635; died at the Charter-house in September, 1715. Although Burnet is now best known as a geologist, or rather as a dashing cosmogonist, it were the height of injustice, should the briefest biography of him omit a tribute to his independence, alike in action and thought. The sensation occasioned by his extraordinary "Theoria Telluris Sacra," has thrown unworthily into the background those rare and solid qualities, which enabled him, when master of the Charter-house, to offer the first formal opposition made in England to that assumption by King James II. of the famous "dispensing power," which ultimately cost him a throne; nor is it always remembered that Burnet subsequently surrendered the high office of clerk of the closet to King William III., rather than retract something accounted heretical in a curious treatise—"Archæologiæ Philosophicæ, sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus." Undoubtedly, however, the chief interest attaching to his name, is connected with his "Sacred Theory of the Earth." The theory itself, of course, as its title may indicate, is abundantly untenable. Burnet assumes that the few abrupt and imperfect notices in the early portion of the book of Genesis, are necessarily and strictly interpretable by physical science; and thereupon he constructs a scheme of the earth's early physical history, which he intends shall be the starting-point of all geological investigation. It were useless to detain the reader with an analysis of his notions concerning the events which preceded the existing order of nature, and launched the world upon its long history, the fractured shattered thing that the outward eye sees in it: but reflections of a general nature, and of consummate importance, are so strongly suggested by the "Theoria," and so essential at the same time to a correct appreciation of the place due to speculators like Burnet, that we must request for them a brief space. 1. It never seems to have occurred to Burnet, and the multitudes who have more or less followed in his path, that a vital preliminary inquiry has escaped them; viz., whether it is possible to establish a sound critique, capable of determining à priori the nature of the relations between these few sentences in Genesis, and physical facts and their natural evolutions; and if so, what are the principles and results of such a critique? Tentatives towards the establishment of a capable critique have, indeed, been made in modern times; they are far from complete, and certainly they have not been universally welcomed: but when Burnet lived, the logical necessity and essential priority of such a task had never been dreamt of; nor can it be said, that even now, a large amount of toil and intellect is not wasted, because of the same fatal oversight. The time has indeed long gone by, in which any investigator could think of attempting to evolve the earth's physical history from intimations so insufficient and obscure. Nay, we have even passed through and escaped from a second phase of error: it would be accounted altogether disreputable amongst us, were any one pretending to the position of a man of science, to twist, or incline to twist, any fact established by careful and approved investigation, so that it might seem to quadrate with cosmogonies based on arbitrary conceptions regarding Genesis. But we have not yet got beyond a third phase: talent unquestionable, and an equally unquestionable earnestness, may be, and still are, occupied without necessary discredit, in ingeniously twisting the terms and clearest meaning of the sacred books, so that they quadrate, or appear to quadrate, with physical facts. The results are altogether to be deplored: persons professing to hold, and really holding these sacred books in supremest reverence, are—for the sake of an hypothesis, or, to say the least, because they have not acknowledged the necessary priority of a sane and comprehensive critique—treating these very books with a philological, or rather an unphilological and unprincipled license, which no scholar of the present day dares to apply to Herodotus or Homer. 2. Burnet's book, however, manifests in excess another error, which also is by no means in disrepute even in our—certainly improved—modern days. When contemplating any of those grander phenomena or aspects of the material universe, where large developments occupy periods reducing sublunary history to a simple tick of the clock, inquiry at its beginning uniformly forgets the element of Time. With Burnet, and very many of our elder scientific geologists, the aspects of the earth presented the idea of sudden convulsions; nor are illustrations rare, in the writings of our most recent inquirers, of a tendency to attribute effects which may be the result of the operation of actions occupying ages, to some start
