Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/948

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STIRLING, M. A.—STIRLING, EARL OF

military service, in such phrases as stipendia facere, and of a campaign, e.g. vicena stipendia meritis (Tac. Ann. i. 17). It also meant a tax or impost, payable in money.

STIRLING, MARY ANNE [Fanny] (1815-1895), English actress, was born in London, the daughter of a Captain Kehl. After soine experience at outlying theatres, she appeared in London in 1836. Having been successful as Celia in As You Like It and Sophia in The Road to Ruin, Macready gave her an opportunity to play Cordelia to his Lear, and Madeline Weir to his James V. in the Rev. James White's King of the Commons. In 1852 she created Peg Woffington in Reade and Taylor's Masks and Faces. Meanwhile she had married Edward Stirling (d. 1894), an actor, manager and dramatic author. In later years Mrs Stirling gained a new popularity as the nurse in Irving's presentation (1882) of Romeo and Juliet, and again (1884) with Mary Anderson; and she was the Martha in Irving's production of Faust (1885). She died on the 30th of December 1895, having in the previous year married Sir Charles Hutton Gregory (1817-1898).

STIRLING, JAMES (1692-1770), Scottish mathematician, third son of Archibald Stirling of Garden, and grandson of Sir Archibald Stirling of Keir (Lord Garden, a lord of session), was born at Garden, Stirlingshire, in 1692. At eighteen years of age he went to Oxford, where, chiefly through the influence of the earl of Mar, he was nominated (1711) one of Bishop Warner's exhibitioners at Balliol. In 1715 he was expelled on account of his correspondence with members of the Keir and Garden families, who were noted Jacobites, and had been accessory to the “Gathering of the Brig o' Turk” in 1708. From Oxford he made his way to Venice, where he occupied himself as a professor of mathematics. In 1717 appeared his Lineae tertii ordinis Newtonianae, sive . . . (8vo, Oxford). While in Venice, also, he communicated, through Sir Isaac Newton, to the Royal Society a paper entitled “Methodus differentials Newtoniana illustrata” (Phil. Trans., 1718). Fearing assassination on account of having discovered a trade secret of the glass-makers of Venice, he returned with Newton's help to London about the year 1725. In London he remained for ten years, being most part of the time connected with an academy in Tower Street, and devoting his leisure to mathematics and correspondence with eminent mathematicians. In 1730 his most important work was published, the Methodus differentialis, sive tractatus de summatione et interpolatione serierum infinitarum (4to, London), which, it must be noted, is something more than an expansion of the paper of 1718. In 1735 he communicated to the Royal Society a paper “On the Figure of the Earth, and on the Variation of the Force of Gravity at its Surface.” In the same year he was appointed manager for the Scots Mining Company at Leadhills. We are thus prepared to find that his next paper to the Royal Society was concerned, not with pure, but with applied science—“Description of a Machine to blow Fire by the Fall of Water” (Phil. Trans. 1745). His name is also connected with another practical undertaking, since grown to vast dimensions. The accounts of the city of Glasgow for 1752 show that the very first instalment of ten millions sterling spent in making Glasgow a seaport, viz. a sum of £28, 4s. 4d., was for a silver tea-kettle to be presented to “James Stirling, mathematician, for his service, pains, and trouble in surveying the river towards deepening it by locks.” Stirling died in Edinburgh on the 5th of December 1770.

See W. Fraser, The Stirlings of Keir, and their Family Papers, (Edinburgh, 1858); “Modern History of Leadhills,” in Gentleman's Magazine (June, 1853); Brewster, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, ii. 300, 307, 411, 516; J. Nicol, Vital Statistics of Glasgow (1881-1885), p. 70; Glasgow Herald (Aug. 5, 1886).

Another edition of the Lineae tertii ordinis was published in Paris in 1797; another edition of the Methodus differentialis in London in 1764; and a translation of the latter into English by Halliday in London in 1749. A considerable collection of literary remains, consisting of papers, letters and two manuscript volumes of a treatise on weights and measures, are still preserved at Garden.

STIRLING, JAMES HUTCHISON (1820-1909), Scottish philosopher, was born at Glasgow on the 22nd of June 1820. He was educated at Glasgow University, where he studied medicine and philosophy. For a short time he practised as a doctor in Wales, but gave up his profession in order to continue his philosophical studies in Germany and France. From 1888 to 1890 he was Gifford lecturer at the university of Edinburgh and published his lectures in 1890 (Philosophy and Theology). He was an LL.D. of Edinburgh University, and foreign member of the Philosophical Society of Berlin. He died in March 1909. His principal works are: The Secret of Hegel (1865; new ed. 1893); Sir William Hamilton: The Philosophy of Perception; a translation of Schwegler's Geschichte der Philosophie (1867; 12th ed., 1893); Jerrold, Tennyson and Macaulay, &c. (1868); On Materialism (1868); As Regards Protoplasm (1869; 2nd ed., 1872); Lectures on the Philosophy of Law (1873); Burns in Drama (1878); Text-Book to Kant (1881); Philosophy in the Poets; Darwinianism; Workmen and Work (1894); What IS Thought? Or the Problem of Philosophy; By Way of a Conclusion So Far (1900); The Categories (1903). Of these the most important is The Secret of Hegel, which is admitted, both in England and in Germany, to be among the most scholarly and valuable contributions to Hegelian doctrine and to modern philosophy in general. In the preface to the new edition he explains that he was first drawn to the study of Hegel by seeing the name in a review, and subsequently heard it mentioned with awe and reverence by two German students. He set himself at once to grapple with the difficulties and to unfold the principles of the Hegelian dialectic, and by his efforts he introduced an entirely new spirit into English philosophy. Closely connected with the Secret is the Text-Book to Kant, which comprises a translation of the Critique with notes and a biography. In these two works Dr Stirling endeavoured to establish an intimate connexion between Kant and Hegel, and even went so far as to maintain that Hegel's doctrine is merely the elucidation and crystallization of the Kantian system. “The secret of Hegel,” he says in the preliminary notice to his great work, “may be indicated at shortest thus: Hegel made explicit the concrete universal that was implicit in Kant.”

The sixth part of the Secret contains valuable criticisms on the Hegelian writings of Schwegler, Rosenkranz and Haym, and explains by contrast much that has been definitely stated in the preceding pages. Of Dr Stirling's other works the most important is the volume of Gifford Lectures, in which he developed a theory of natural theology in relation to philosophy as a whole. As Regards Protoplasm contains an attempted refutation of the Essay on the Physical Basis of Life by Huxley.

STIRLING, WILLIAM ALEXANDER, Earl of (c. 1567-1640), most generally known as Sir William Alexander, Scottish poet and statesman, son of Alexander Alexander of Menstrie (Clackmannanshire), was born at Menstrie House, near Stirling, about 1567. The family was old and claimed to be descended from Somerled, lord of the Isles, through John, lord of the Isles, who married Margaret, daughter of Robert II. William Alexander was probably educated at Stirling grammar school. There is a tradition that he was at Glasgow University; and, according to Drummond of Hawthornden, he was a student at the university of Leiden. He accompanied Archibald, 7th earl of Argyll, his neighbour at Castle Campbell, on his travels in France, Spain and Italy. He married, before 1604, Janet, daughter of Sir William Erskine, one of the Balgonie family. Introduced by Argyll at court, Alexander speedily gained the favour of James VI., whom he followed to England, where he became one of the gentlemen-extraordinary of prince Henry's chamber. For the prince he wrote his Paraenesis to the Prince . . . (1604), a poem in eight-lined stanzas on the familiar theme of princely duty. He was knighted in 1609. On the death of Henry in 1612, when he wrote an elegy on his young patron, he was appointed to the household of prince Charles. In 1613 he (in conjunction with Thomas Foulis and Paulo Pinto, a Portuguese) received from the king a grant of a silver-mine at Hilderston near Linlithgow, from which, however, neither the Crown nor the undertakers made any profit. In 1613 he began a correspondence with the poet Drummond of Hawthornden, which ripened into a lifelong intimacy after their meeting (March 1614) at Menstrie House, where Alexander was on one of his