into his own pursuits, and fond of experimenting before them, particularly with his electrical machine. She remembers the starts and shocks she received, and also being occasionally left alone in the dark, when Mr. Brewster would appear among them with his outstretched hand and fingers all in an apparent blaze from phosphorus. Some of his scientific practices greatly incensed Mrs. Dickson, the housekeeper, who declared that he would never rest till he had set the house on fire.
His principal literary works, many of which have obtained a wide popular circulation, are his "Life of Sir Isaac Newton," published in Murray's "Family Library," and the larger memoirs embodying the fruits of twenty years of investigation, published in 1855; his notes and introduction to Legendre's "Geometry" (1824); his "Treatise on Optics" (1831); "Letters on Natural Magic" (1831); "The Martyrs of Science" (1841); and "More Worlds than One" (1854). The list of his briefer scientific papers and miscellaneous writings includes, besides the seventy-five articles contributed to the "North British Review," three hundred and fifteen titles.
A monition of the waning of his vital powers came to Sir David in the spring of 1867, when he lost consciousness in a fainting-fit in his class-room at the university. He attended the British Association at Dundee, in September of the same year, and had another fainting-fit, after enduring the crowd and heat of the public assembly. He returned to his home, never to leave it again, but had to occupy himself with the papers of the forged Pascal-Newton correspondence, and to ward off from Newton's memory the blot which it was attempted to put upon it. This was the last act of his scientific and literary career. "He went straight from this controversy into the gathering silences," and died, at Allerly, Melrose, February 10, 1868.
