locked up in the city hall until all attempts to enforce the new law were abandoned. Subsequently Colden secured the suspension of the provincial assembly by an act of parliament. He understood, however, the real temper of the patriot party, and in 1775, when the outbreak of hostilities seemed inevitable, he strongly advised the ministry to act with caution and to concede some of the colonists’ demands. When the war began, he retired to his Long Island country seat, where he died on the 28th of September 1776. Colden was widely known among scientists and men of letters in England and America. He was a life-long student of botany, and was the first to introduce in America the classification system of Linnaeus, who gave the name “Coldenia” to a newly recognized genus. He was an intimate friend of Benjamin Franklin. He wrote several medical works of importance in their day, the most noteworthy being A Treatise on Wounds and Fevers (1765); he also wrote The History of the Five Indian Nations depending on the Province of New York (1727, reprinted 1866 and 1905), and an elaborate work on The Principles of Action in Matter (1751) which, with his Introduction to the Study of Physics (c. 1756), his Enquiry into the Principles of Vital Motion (1766), and his Reflections (c. 1770), mark him as the first of American materialists and one of the ablest material philosophers of his day. I. Woodbridge Riley, in American Philosophy (New York, 1907), made the first critical study of Colden’s philosophy, and said of it that it combined “Newtonian mechanics with the ancient hylozoistic doctrine ...” and “ultimately reached a kind of dynamic panpsychism, substance being conceived as a self-acting and universally diffused principle, whose essence is power and force.”
See Alice M. Keys, Cadwallader Colden, A Representative 18th Century Official (New York, 1906), a Columbia University doctoral dissertation; J. G. Mumford, Narrative of Medicine in America (New York, 1903); and Asa Gray, “Selections from the Scientific Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden” in American Journal of Science, vol. 44, 1843.
His grandson, Cadwallader David Colden (1769–1834), lawyer and politician, was educated in London, but returned in 1785 to New York, where he attained great distinction at the bar. He was a colonel of volunteers during the war of 1812, and from 1818 to 1821 was the successor of Jacob Radcliff as mayor of New York City. He was a member of the state assembly (1818) and the state senate (1825–1827), and did much to secure the construction of the Erie Canal and the organization of the state public school system; and in 1821–1823 he was a representative in Congress. He wrote a Life of Robert Fulton (1817) and a Memoir of the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals (1825).
COLD HARBOR, Old and New, two localities in Hanover county, Virginia, U.S.A., 10 m. N.E. of Richmond. They were the scenes of a succession of battles, on May 31-June 12, 1864, between the Union forces under command of General U. S.
Grant and the Confederates under General R. E. Lee, who
held a strongly entrenched line at New Cold Harbor. The
main Union attack on June 3 was delivered by the II.
(Hancock), VI. (Wright), and XVIII. (W. F. Smith) corps, and
was brought to a standstill in eight minutes. An order from army
headquarters to renew the attack was ignored by the officers and
men at the front, who realized fully the strength of the hostile
position. These troops lost as many as 5,000 men in an hour’s
fighting, the greater part in the few minutes of the actual assault.
In the constant fighting of 31st of May to 12th of June on this
ground Grant lost 14,000 men. (See Wilderness and American Civil War.)
COLDSTREAM, a police burgh of Berwickshire, Scotland.
Pop. (1901) 1482. It is situated on the north bank of the Tweed,
here spanned by John Smeaton’s fine bridge of five arches,
erected in 1763–1766, 13½ m. south-west of Berwick by the
North Eastern railway. The chief public buildings are the town
hall, library, mechanics’ institute, and cottage hospital. Some
brewing is carried on. Owing to its position on the Border and
also as the first ford of any consequence above Berwick, the
town played a prominent part in Scottish history during many
centuries. Here Edward I. crossed the stream in 1296 with his
invading host, and Montrose with the Covenanters in 1640.
Of the Cistercian priory, founded about 1165 by Cospatric of
Dunbar, and destroyed by the 1st earl of Hertford in 1545, which
stood a little to the east of the present market-place, no trace
remains; but for nearly four hundred years it was a centre of
religious fervour. Here it was that the papal legate, in the reign
of Henry VIII., published a bull against the printing of the
Scriptures; and by the irony of fate its site was occupied in the
19th century by an establishment, under Dr Adam Thomson,
for the production of cheap Bibles. At Coldstream General
Monk raised in 1659 the celebrated regiment of Foot Guards
bearing its name. Like Gretna Green, Coldstream long enjoyed
a notoriety as the resort of runaway couples, the old toll-house
at the bridge being the usual scene of the marriage ceremony.
“Marriage House,” as it is called, still exists in good repair.
Henry Brougham, afterwards lord chancellor, was married in
this clandestine way, though in an inn and not at the bridge, in
1821. Birgham, 3 m. west, was once a place of no small importance,
for there in 1188 William the Lion conferred with the bishop
of Durham concerning the attempt of the English Church to
impose its supremacy upon Scotland; there in 1289 was held the
convention to consider the question of the marriage of the Maid
of Norway with Prince Edward of England; and there, too, in
1290 was signed the treaty of Birgham, which secured the independence
of Scotland. Seven miles below Coldstream on the
English side, though 6 m. north-east of it, are the massive ruins
of Norham Castle, made famous by Scott’s Marmion, and from
the time of its building by Ranulph Flambard in 1121 a focus
of Border history during four centuries.
COLDWATER, a city and county-seat of Branch county,
Michigan, U.S.A., on Coldwater Stream (which connects two
of the group of small lakes in the vicinity), about 80 m.
S.S.E. of Grand Rapids. Pop. (1890) 5247; (1900) 6216, of
whom 431 were foreign-born; (1904) 6225; (1910) 5945. It
is served by the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern railway. It is
the seat of a state public school and temporary home (opened
in 1874) for dependent, neglected or ill-treated children, who
are received at any age under twelve. The city is situated in
a fine farming region, has an important flouring and grist mill
industry, and also manufactures Portland cement, liniment,
lumber, furniture, sashes, doors and blinds, brass castings, sleighs,
shoes, &c. The municipality owns and operates the water-works
and electric lighting plant. Coldwater was settled in 1829, was
laid out as a town under the name of Lyons in 1832, received its
present name in the following year, was incorporated as a village
in 1837, was reached by railway and became the county-seat in
1851, and was chartered as a city in 1861.
COLE, SIR HENRY (1808–1882), English civil servant, was born at Bath on the 15th of July 1808, and was the son of an officer in the army. At the age of fifteen he became clerk to Sir Francis Palgrave, then a subordinate officer in the record office, and, helped by Charles Buller, to whom he had been introduced by Thomas Love Peacock, and who became chairman of a royal commission for inquiry into the condition of the public records, worked his way up until he became an assistant keeper. He largely assisted in influencing public opinion in support of Sir Rowland Hill’s reforms at the post office. A connexion with the Society of Arts caused him to drift gradually out of the record office: he was a leading member of the commission that organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, and upon the conclusion of its labours was made secretary to the School of Design, which by a series of transformations became in 1853 the Department of Science and Art. Under its auspices the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum was founded in 1855 upon land purchased out of the surplus of the exhibition, and Cole practically became its director, retiring in 1873. His proceedings were frequently criticized, but the museum owes much to his energy. Indefatigable, genial and masterful, he drove everything before him, and by all sorts of schemes and devices built up a great institution, whose variety and inequality of composition seemed imaged in the anomalous structure in which it was temporarily housed. He also, though
