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Colin MacLaurin
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or P, &c., respectively, then the free summit moves on a curve of the degree 2mnp. .. . which reduces to mnp .... when the fixed points all lie on a right line." In 1722 Maclaurin travelled as tutor and companion to the eldest son of Lord Polwarth, and after a short stay in Paris resided for some time in Lorraine, where he wrote an essay on the percussion of bodies, which obtained the prize of the French Academy of Sciences for the year 1724. The following year he was elected professor of mathematics in the university of Edinburgh on the urgent recommendation of Newton. After the death of Newton, in 1728, his nephew, John Conduitt, applied to Maclaurin for his assistance in publishing an. account of Newton's life and discoveries. This Maclaurin gladly undertook, but the death of Conduitt put a stop to the project.
In 1740 Maclaurin divided with Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli the prize offered by the French Academy of Sciences for an essay on tides. His Treatise on Fluxions was published at Edinburgh in 1742, in two volumes. In the preface he states that the work was undertaken in consequence of the attack on the method of fluxions made by George Berkeley in 1734. Maclaurin's object was to found the doctrine of fluxions on geometrical demonstration, and thus to answer all objections to its method as being founded on false reasoning and full of mystery. The most valuable part of the work is that devoted to physical applications, in which he embodied his essay on the tides. In this he showed that a homogeneous fluid mass revolving uniformly round an axis under the action of gravity ought to assume the form of an ellipsoid of revolution. The importance of this investigation in connexion with the theory of the tides, the figure of the earth, and other kindred questions, has always caused it to be regarded as one of the great problems of mathematical physics. Maclaurin was the first to introduce into mechanics, in this discussion, the important conception of surfaces of level; namely, surfaces at each of whose points the total force acts in the normal direction. He also gave in his Fluxions, for the first time, the correct theory for distinguishing between maxima and minima in general, and pointed out the importance of the distinction in the theory of the multiple points of curves. In 1745, when the rebels were marching on Edinburgh, Maclaurin took a most prominent part in preparing trenches and barricades for its defence. The anxiety, fatigue and cold to which he was thus exposed, affecting a constitution naturally weak, laid the foundation of the disease to which he afterwards succumbed. As soon as the rebel army got possession of Edinburgh Maclaurin fled to England, to avoid making submission to the Pretender. He accepted the invitation of T. Herring, then archbishop of York, with whom he remained until it was safe to return to Edinburgh. He died of dropsy on the 14th of June 1746, at Edinburgh. Maclaurin was married in 1733 to Anne, daughter of Walter Stewart, solicitorgeneral for Scotland. His eldest son John, born in 1734, was distinguished as an advocate, and appointed one of the judges of the Scottish court of session, with the title of Lord Dreghorn. He inherited an attachment to scientific discovery, and was one of the founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in 1782.
After Maclaurin's death his account of Newton's philosophical discoveries was published by Patrick Murdoch, and also his algebra in 1748. As an appendix to the latter appeared his De linearum geometricarum 'proprietatibus generalibus tractatus, a treatise of remarkable elegance. Of the more immediate successors of Newton in Great Britain Maclaurin is probably the only one who can be placed in competition with the great mathematicians of the continent of Europe at the time. (B. W.) M`Lennan, John Ferguson (1827-1881), Scottish ethnologist, was born at Inverness on the 14th of October 1827. He studied at King's college, Aberdeen, where he graduated with distinction in 1849, thence proceeding to Cambridge, where he remained till 1855 without taking a degree. He was called to the Scottish bar in 1857, and in 1871 was appointed parliamentary draughtsman for Scotland. In 1865 he published Primitive Marriage, in which, arguing from the prevalence of the symbolical form of capture in the marriage ceremonies of primitive races, he developed an intelligible picture of the growth of the marriage relation and of systems of kinship (see Family) according to natural laws. In 1866 he wrote in the Fortnightly Review (April and May) an essay on "Kinship in Ancient Greece," in which he proposed to test by early Greek facts the theory of the history of kinship set forth in Primitive Marriage; and three years later appeared a series of essays on "Totemism" in the same periodical for 1869-1870 (the germ of which had been contained in the paper just named), which mark the second great step in his systematic study of early society. A reprint of Primitive Marriage, with "Kinship in Ancient Greece" and some other essays not previously published, appeared in 1876, under the title of Studies in Ancient History. The new essays in this volume were mostly critical, but one of them, in which perhaps his guessing talent is seen at its best, "The Divisions of the Irish Family," is an elaborate discussion of a problem which has long puzzled both Celtic scholars and jurists; and in another, "On the Classificatory System of Relationship," he propounded a new explanation of a series of facts which, he thought, might throw light upon the early history of society, at the same time putting to the test of those facts the theories he had set forth in Primitive Marriage. Papers on "The Levirate and Polyandry," following up the line of his previous investigations ( Fortnightly Review, 1877), were the last work he was able to publish. He died of consumption on the 14th of June 1881 at Hayes Common, Kent.
Besides the works already cited, M'Lennan wrote a Life of Thomas Drummond (1867). The vast materials which he had accumulated on kinship were edited by his widow and A. Platt, under the title Studies in Ancient History: Second Series (1896).
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Colin MacLaurin'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/c/colin-maclaurin.html. 1910.
