the president to the secretary, and the manner in which scientific papers were brought before the society’s notice: he seemed much struck, I thought, and rather amused, with the custom of discussing subjects publicly at the meetings in Edinburgh. When I told him the number of members was several hundreds, he shook his head, and said, ‘All these cannot surely be men of science!’ When he had satisfied himself on this topic, he reverted to the subject of my father, and after seeming to make a calculation, observed, ‘Your father must, I think, be my senior by nine or ten years – at least nine – but I think ten. Tell me, is it not so?’ I answered, that he was very nearly correct. Upon which he laughed and turned almost completely round on his heel, nodding his head several times. I did not presume to ask him where the joke lay, but imagined he was pleased with the correctness of his computation. He followed up his enquiries by begging to know what number of children my father had; and did not quit this branch of the subject till he had obtained a correct list of the ages and occupation of the whole family. He then asked, ‘How long were you in France?’ and on my saying I had not yet visited that country, he desired to know where I had learned French. I said, from Frenchmen on board various ships of war. ‘Were you the prisoner amongst the French,’ he asked, ‘or were they your prisoners?’ I told him my teachers were French officers captured by the ships I had served in. He then desired me to describe the details of the chase and capture of the ships we had made prize of; but soon seeing that this subject afforded no point of any interest, he cut it short by asking me about the Lyra’s voyage to the Eastern Seas, from which I was now returning. This topic proved a new and fertile source of interest, and he engaged in it, accordingly, with the most astonishing degree of eagerness.
“The opportunities which his elevated station had given Napoleon of obtaining information on almost every subject, and his vast power of rapid and correct observation, had rendered it a matter of so much difficulty to place before him anything totally new, that I considered myself fortunate in having something to speak of beyond the mere common places of a formal interview. Buonaparte has always been supposed to have taken a particular interest in Eastern affairs; and from the avidity with which he seemed to devour the information I gave him about Loo-Choo, China, and the adjacent countries, it was impossible to doubt the sincerity of his oriental predilections. A notion also prevails, if I am not mistaken, that his geographical knowledge of those distant regions was rather loose – a charge which, by the way, Buonaparte probably shares with most people. I was, therefore, not a little surprised to discover his ideas upon the relative situation of the countries in the China and Japan seas to be very distinct and precise. On my naming the island of Loo-Choo to him, he shook his head as if he had never heard of it before, and made me tell him how it bore from Canton, and what was the distance. He next asked its bearing with respect to Japan and Manilla, by the intersection of which three