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As others have pointed out this is a bit like what have the Romans ever done for us, the list is rather endless, but pretty much everything from the Scottish Enlightenment on is thanks to the union.What was, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a small, poor, politically and culturally disorientated country, had, towards the end of that century, achieved a commanding status as one of the European centres of Enlightenment thought and practice.Science in the Scottish EnlightenmentThe Enlightenment in ScotlandThe Enlightenment was a programme, rather than a set of completed achievements. Enlightenment thinkers produced few theories comparable with Copernicus's or Newton's in former centuries, or with Darwin's in the next. What makes them memorable is the vigour and confidence of their conviction that the universe – from the orbits of the planets to the workings of the human mind and of human society – is explicable, regular and lawlike, and will yield to the systematic application of rational, empirical, scientific procedures.Enlightenment thinkers attempted to extend the realm of lawlike regularities beyond the physical sciences into biology, geology, medicine, psychology, politics, economics, history. Indeed, wherever knowledge was to be gained, it had to be scientific, empirical knowledge: it was the only sort that counted. Moreover, this knowledge, however abstract, should graduate into practical schemes for human welfare – into schemes for agricultural improvement, for industry, for better surgery and midwifery, for better laws.There was to be no mystery. The ‘unknown’ signified only that which had not yet been understood: the Enlightenment recognised no category of ‘the unknowable’. And the most potent source of light to dispel the darkness of ignorance, blind authority, and religion, was science.The men (and one or two women) of the Enlightenment formed what one of the foremost historians of the movement has called a self-consciously cosmopolitan, European ‘philosophic family’ (Gay, 1973, vol. 1, p. 6). Inevitably, though, branches of the family took tinges of colour from the various national cultures within which they grew.This course is concerned with science in Scotland, one of the most dynamic centres of Enlightenment thinking. Writers speak of the mid-eighteenth century as Scotland's ‘Golden Age’. In order to get the flavour of this age, it is necessary to take a very broad view of what we mean by ‘science’. If we stay within the boundaries recognised by modern science faculties, we will miss most of what is distinctive about eighteenth-century Scotland. The interconnections and cross-fertilisation between disciplines that we now regard as having little to do with each other is one of the remarkable features of the Scottish scene. Geologists associated with historians, economists with chemists, philosophers with surgeons, lawyers with farmers, church ministers with architects.Obviously, if we stretch the term ‘science’ too far, it disintegrates, but it is worth bearing in mind that the very term ‘scientist’ was not coined until the 1830s. Half a century earlier, a meeting of a learned society in Edinburgh, or Glasgow, or Aberdeen, would have brought together representatives of all the interests listed above, and they would all have recognised that they were engaged on a single project – namely, the pursuit of natural knowledge, by the light of observational, empirical methods, which in turn would lead to ‘improvement’ in the affairs of Scotland.The Scottish conception of science and its purpose was neatly summed up in the programme of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, or ‘Wise Club’ as it came to be known, founded in 1758: the Society aimed to investigateevery Principle of Science which may be deduced by Just and Lawfull Induction from the Phaenomena either of the human Mind or of the material World; all Observations and Experiments that may furnish Materials for such Induction; the Examination of False Schemes of Philosophy and false Methods of Philosophising; the Subserviency of Philosophy to Arts, the Principles they borrow from it and the Means of carrying them out to their Perfection.(Chitnis, 1976, p. 200)The summary is useful too in showing how the meaning of key words has shifted since the eighteenth century. As the name indicates, the members of the Aberdeen Society were interested in philosophy, but they used the term to signify what today would be regarded as science. The word ‘science’ in their quite typical usage meant simply ‘knowledge’. They were also interested in ‘arts’, by which they meant, not the fine arts, but skills or even trades: arts would have included activities like printing, or agriculture – it signified something close to the modern conception of technology. It is interesting to see that the practical Aberdeen Society stressed ‘the subserviency of Philosophy to Arts’, by which it meant that science provided a base for technology: science should ultimately, in their view, be in the service of technological application.2 Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment2.1 The Act of Union, 1707Before examining Scottish science in detail, we need a sketch of the particular Scottish historical background from which an astonishing cluster of intellectuals and ideas emerged. It needs to be said at the outset, however, that there is no scholarly consensus as to why a small, poor country in Northern Europe should have made such a disproportionately large contribution to the thought of the age.The event in Scottish history which tends to polarise opinion among scholars is the Act of Union with England, of 1707. The crowns of the two nations had been unified a century earlier, in 1603, when the Stuart James VI became king, not just of his native Scotland, but also of England, where he reigned as James I. But in 1707, Scotland gave up its parliament, and henceforth, the government of the country shifted from Edinburgh to Westminster. Some scholars have seen the Act of Union as precipitating a crisis in Scottish identity. Where, after 1707, might the intellectual energy of the nation be expressed?The politically ambitious would speed to Westminster and join the scramble for office, shedding, in the process, their national loyalty. But what of those who remained in Scotland, yet who wished to contribute publicly to the nation's affairs? One route that might be predicted leads to the development and nourishing of a distinctive Scottish national culture, in protest against the loss of nationhood entailed by the Act of Union. After all, Scotland had its own languages – Gaelic in the Highlands, and Scots (a very markedly distinct form of English) in the Lowlands – and had its own unique culture and social system, especially in the Highlands. Perhaps we would predict the birth, after 1707, of a Scottish national, cultural movement.This route was not taken. The leading lights of Scottish society came, almost wholly, from the Lowlands, and they directed their energies towards the establishment of an English-speaking, urban, civilised, commercial society that did not brandish Scottishness at every turn. Notably, they tended not to throw in their lot with the two Jacobite rebellions (of 1715 and 1745) which sought to restore the Stuart monarchy in Britain, and which embodied aspirations for Scottish national independence. The unwillingness of Scottish intellectuals to become identified with what they saw as a defeated, out-moded national culture is illustrated by one of the elegant deathbed utterances of perhaps the foremost intellectual of the age, the philosopher David Hume. He died, it was reported, ‘confessing not his sins, but his Scotticisms’: that is to say, he regretted not having succeeded in purging residual Scots phrases from his otherwise immaculate English prose.For some scholars, then, the Act of Union had a ‘traumatic effect’. It left the Scottish elite bereft of real political institutions, yet dissatisfied with the remnants of an ancient Scottish culture. They engaged, it is argued, in a search for a new ‘cultural style’ (Phillipson, 1973, 1981).For other scholars, the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment are to be found not in a sudden trauma, but buried within long traditions in the Scottish economy and society. Scotland was certainly a poor, small country in the late seventeenth century, it is acknowledged, but a number of writers have looked hard at seemingly moribund institutions and found that commercial, scientific and philosophical life was stirring. For these writers, the Scottish Enlightenment was the flowering of Scotland's own indigenous traditions. Three areas of enquiry have been fruitful: the Church, the universities and the economy.2.2 The ChurchThe Scottish Church seems an unlikely place to look for the stirrings of enlightenment. In 1690, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed an act against ‘the Atheistical Opinions of the Deists’, and, in 1696, an eighteen-year-old Edinburgh University student was executed for denying some of the propositions of Christianity. The legacy of the Scottish, Calvinist Reformation, it seems, was one of conformism, intolerance and narrow-mindedness.But this is not the whole story. Another impulse from the Reformation itself was founded on the principle of critical scrutiny of Catholic tradition. This rational, critical impulse was felt by more liberal members of the Scottish Church, and was given typical expression by the Reverend William Wallace, a minister close to the pulse of Edinburgh University life. He preached, in 1729, that there must be ahearkening to the voice of sound reason, the examining impartially both sides of the question, with a disposition always to adhere to the stronger side and to embrace the truth wherever it appears in spite of all prejudices, of all opposition and authority of men. This is what I can never censure or apprehend being capable of being carried to an extreme,(quoted in Cameron, 1982, p. 123)The tradition that Wallace represented grew steadily during the century, and the ‘Moderate Party’ of the General Assembly, as it became known, was receptive to – and in return made contributions to – Enlightenment thinking.At a more general level, the intensely pious Calvinist tradition may have flowed in unexpected, worldly directions. Calvinist zeal may have been one of the ingredients in the development of Scottish industry and the economy in the eighteenth century. Here is how a leading Scottish historian puts it:The singleminded drive that is seen so often in business, farming and trade in the eighteenth century, and which appeared in cultural matters in men as diverse as Adam Smith, James Watt and Sir Walter Scott, is strangely reminiscent of the energy of the seventeenth-century elders in the kirk when they set about imposing discipline on the congregation. Calvinism thus seems to be released as a psychological force for secular change just at the moment when it is losing its power as a religion.(Smout, 1969, p. 92)This is an attractive suggestion, but we should not underestimate the problems inherent in transmuting a religious drive into a secular one. Calvinism – indeed Christianity at large – teaches that human nature is depraved. In 1717, in criticising a Moderate minister, the Church Assembly held that he had attributed ‘too much to natural reason and corrupt nature’ (Cameron, 1982, p.119). Plainly, a number of radical intellectual moves had to be made before human nature could be presented (as it was in the Enlightenment) as notably uncorrupt – as fundamentally social, and likely to be virtuous, given a rationally organised society.2.3 The universitiesTurning to the universities, scholars have discovered that much more was going on during the late seventeenth century than the unimaginative training of young men for ministry in a dour church. Another legacy from the Reformation in Scotland was a recognition of the need for education, and, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, five universities, in four cities, were well established. (England, a far larger country, had only two.) Research and specialist teaching was held back by a system known as ‘regenting’, whereby individual ‘regents’ taught every subject to undergraduates. Not until the eighteenth century could lecturers break out of this generalist teaching of often outdated material, and provide specialist courses.Even so, the universities were not backwaters. The work of Shepherd, for example, has shown that Newton's work was finding its way onto the syllabuses of Scottish universities from the 1680s. She has also reconstructed syllabuses at Edinburgh which show that the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Boyle was being taught (Shepherd, 1982). And in a reconstruction of Hume's education at Edinburgh University in the 1720s, Barfoot has found evidence that he was alerted there to the latest developments in science (Barfoot, 1990).Not all innovation came from beyond Scotland's borders, and that which did was just as likely to have come from the Netherlands as from England, especially in the field of medicine. There were powerful links between medicine in Leiden and in Edinburgh. There were also entirely local traditions in mathematics, chemistry and medicine.Figure 1: The Scottish connection2.4 The economyTurning lastly to the late seventeenth-century economy, a similar pattern of historical revision is revealed. Accounts stressing desperate poverty and backwardness have given way to accounts which indicate a more prosperous, vigorous state of affairs. In a survey of the Scottish merchant community, Devine has concluded that although the nation had not fully insulated itself against the calamity of bad harvests, its merchants were forward-looking and ready to innovate. They were not locked into conservative social hierarchies which inhibited commercial ventures. Sons of lairds became merchants: merchants bought land – it was an ‘open’ society. Here is Devine's conclusion:The business classes possessed the sophistication crucial to later advance. The merchant class made little intellectual contribution to the early Enlightenment; their function was more indirect, to help to provide, with the professional and landed classes, a social and material environment which was not resistant to change, whether in the cultural or economic spheres.(Devine, 1982, p. 37)It is from this background of mercantile openness that works like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), the foundation text in the new social science of economics, came. From the same background, it is important to note, came the harsh industrial regimes of the early factories: enlightenment could sometimes be exploitation dressed up in new clothes.No matter whether it is the supposed ‘trauma’ of the Act of Union, or longer, indigenous traditions which command historians' attention in their quest for the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, there is no dispute about the general characteristics of the movement once it was underway.3 The Enlightenment milieu3.1 Clubs and societiesThe milieu was urban. It was not a business of isolated individuals working in country estates, or of secluded academics, cloistered within unworldly universities. The scene was convivial, social. The focus was Edinburgh, although Glasgow and Aberdeen were active too. Cities were small. Even the capital was intimate enough for its intelligentsia to be able to meet regularly and casually. ‘Here I stand, at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh’, wrote an excited visitor, ‘and within a few minutes take fifty men of genius by the hand’ (quoted in Daiches, 1986, p. 1).Perhaps the most characteristic expression of the conviviality and energy of the place was the club, or the society. Dozens of them were formed during the century, some short-lived dining and drinking clubs, some maturing into august scientific and medical bodies that still exist. Some, like the Poker Club (concerned with poking up sluggish intellectual fires, not card games), the Oyster Club or the Friday Club, at first sight seem frivolous – excuses, perhaps, for male claret-swilling – but behind the grandiloquence, serious issues were debated. The Oyster Club, for example, had among its founders the economist Adam Smith, the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton – all pioneers in their fields and indebted to each other's criticism, help and stimulus.Two societies can be singled out as being of fundamental importance in the discussion and dissemination of science. In 1731, the professors of medicine at Edinburgh founded the Medical Society of Edinburgh. The driving force was Alexander Monro, the first in a dynasty of three generations of Alexander Monros (known as primus, secundus and tertius – first, second and third) who dominated Edinburgh medicine. The Society published medical research and soon established for itself a reputation in European medicine.When Alexander Monro primus fell ill, Colin McLaurin, an Edinburgh University mathematician and Newtonian, broadened the Society's scope to include all ‘philosophical’ topics (in the eighteenth-century sense), and the name changed to the Philosophical Society. The membership is a rollcall of the Scottish Enlightenment: McLaurin himself, Joseph Black, James Hutton, Adam Smith, David Hume, the chemist and doctor William Cullen, and the philosopher Dugald Stewart. The Society flourished from 1737 until 1783. Within its boundaries, smaller, special-interest groups, like the Newtonian Club, operated. The Society as a whole achieved the highest possible status when it was given a royal charter in 1783, to emerge as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the premier scientific society of the country.Medicine did not fall by the wayside when the Philosophical Society broadened its scope. A student medical society, which met first in 1734, grew, within forty years, into the Royal Medical Society, which was chartered in 1778. And along the way, it developed the full infrastructure of a lively scientific academy – premises, a library, a museum, a laboratory, prizes, publications.The historian Roger Emerson, who has made extensive studies of Scottish science, has assembled a useful identikit picture of a member of an Edinburgh Society. It brings out clearly the social background and the wide-ranging commercial and intellectual interests of the men who founded the clubs and societies. Emerson's picture is of a typical member of the Philosophical Society, in 1739: such a memberwas an active professional man from the landed gentry who was politically involved and who held a patronage post which enhanced an income not wholly derived from rents. Tied to Edinburgh and to Scotland by economic interests, various responsibilities, language, sentiment, and perhaps by his training in Scots law, he was a place seeker whose prospects outside Scotland were limited but within the kingdom reasonably good. Well educated and usually the beneficiary of foreign travels, he was aware of the backwardness and provincialism of his country, and patriotic enough to wish to remedy it. Relying on provincial institutions for his status and income, he sought to raise both through improvements which would modernize the country, and allow it and him to play greater roles in the world. His enlightenment, and the work of his academy, would be practical, non-literary, career-furthering and conservative of his position as a member of an economic, social, and intellectual elite dominating the kingdom's institutions.(Emerson, 1979, p. 173)3.2 PublishingOne of the strongest impulses in the Enlightenment was to codify knowledge and publish it widely. The most notable example of this impulse is the French Encyclopedic, 'a rational dictionary of the sciences, art and trades’, published chiefly in Paris in the 1750s and 1760s, under the indomitable editorship of Denis Diderot. The seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates were intended to summarise and clearly present everything that was worth knowing, from the construction of a water wheel or a glass manufactory to the latest theories in the psychology of perception.The impulse which drove Diderot was working in Edinburgh too. A number of encyclopaedias were started, but the venture which became the most famous was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which started in the 1760s. Britannica was coaxed into life by the printer, William Smellie, a man who, though without formal academic qualifications, was a key figure in the dissemination of the work produced within Edinburgh. By the turn of the century, and with perhaps significantly less bashfulness about its origin, the Edinburgh Review was launched. This journal quickly achieved a British reputation and became one of the most influential reviews of science, politics, economics and the arts.(From frontispiece to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3rd edn, Edinburgh, 1788. Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.) ©Figure 2: An ideal of the Academy: the happy union of arts, science and technology. (Note that the title does not signal the encyclopaedia's Scottish origin – a further indication of the movement's ambivalent attitude to nationhood.)3.3 ArchitecturePrinting and publishing, then, had their connections with the Enlightenment programme. Architecture too was related. The Adam family of architects (the father and his two sons) moved in the Edinburgh circle of the intellectuals. The young Robert Adam, for example, attended both McLaurin's mathematics lectures and Monro's anatomy lectures at the university, and his home life was enlivened by regular visits from the leading lights of the city. As one contemporary described the household, in a rolling eighteenth-century sentence:The numerous family of Mr Adam, the uninterrupted cordiality in which they lived, their conciliatory manners and the various accomplishments in which they severally made proh'cience, formed a most attractive society and failed not to draw around them a set of men whose learning and genius have since done honour to that country which gave them birth …(quoted in Fleming, 1962, p. 5)View larger image(By courtesy of the Edinburgh City Libraries.) ©Figure 3: North view of the new and old towns of Edinburgh, from Inverleith, 1781In the mid-century, Edinburgh was still an ancient city clustering around the castle and stretching down the hill to the neglected royal palace of Holyrood. But in 1752, the astute provost of the city, George Drummond, launched a plan to lay out a new town, beyond the North Loch, which would itself be drained. There were setbacks, but steadily there arose a rational grid of coolly elegant streets and squares, relieved by the occasional curve or gradient.As it arose, however, the New Town, as it became known, was failing quite to realise the grandeur implicit in the ground plan, and in 1791, Robert Adam, who was by then making his fortune in England, was called in to design a monumental square in order to demonstrate just what could be done with urban housing, if conceived on a grand scale. The result is Charlotte Square, in which rows of terraced houses, built for the prosperous bourgeoisie, are successfully subordinated to a conception of a single, palatial edifice.It would be too slick to present the elegant, rational Edinburgh New Town simply and baldly as the embodiment of Scottish Enlightenment – especially as the leading lights of the movement preferred to stay over in the racier old town – but in tracing the networks of people and ideas that flourished in the city, the route that leads to architecture and town planning is not to be ignored.3.4 The role of the Edinburgh Town CouncilThis route incidentally leads us to another important feature of the movement, namely the role of the Edinburgh Town Council and its provosts. (The English equivalent would be a lord mayor.) Throughout the eighteenth century, the Town Council, with a policy of enlightened self-interest, promoted the city by sponsoring or patronising its academic, medical and scientific life. The Council regarded the city's university, infirmary and medical school as institutions which, if given enough prestige, would not only stop the drift of Scottish students and their fees to foreign universities – especially to Leiden for medical training – but also reverse the flow and attract fee-paying students to Edinburgh from across Europe and America. Accordingly, it took an active role in the appointment of professors who would bring fame. As early as 1713, the Council minuted its reasons for appointing James Crawford to the chair of chemistry at the university: the appointment was made… particularly considering that through the want of professors of physick and chymistry in this Kingdome the youth who have applyed themselves to study have been necessitat to travel and remain abroad a considerable time for their education to the great prejudice of the nation by the necessary charges occasioned thereby …(quoted in Christie, 1974, pp. 127–8)Another such appointment was that of Colin McLaurin, the mathematician and Newtonian, to the chair of mathematics in 1725. McLaurin had formerly been at Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he had taken a rather high-handed view of his teaching duties. Somewhat oddly, this did not count against him when he was recruited for Edinburgh. What counted for him was a growing European reputation: a rising star could be caught. The tempting modern analogy is with those town councils who invest in their cities' football teams. The perhaps more sober conclusion of the historian who has investigated this episode is that McLaurin's appointment guaranteed that ‘the University of Edinburgh became an acknowledged centre for the diffusion of Newtonian mathematics, astronomy, and natural philosophy by the most gifted and accomplished British disciple of his generation’ (Morrell, 1974, p. 86).McLaurin also mended his lackadaisical attitude to lecturing, and taught courses which included surveying and gunnery: his classes were not just for aspiring young mathematicians; they were also to serve the practical needs of students who intended to become engineers and army officers (Christie, 1974, p. 125). The architect Robert Adam, it will be recalled, also attended McLaurin's classes.Regenting (the system of low-grade generalist teaching) came to an end in Scottish universities in the early decades of the eighteenth century, opening the way to the endowment of specialist professorships. In Edinburgh, for example, there were already chairs in natural philosophy, medicine and mathematics, surviving from the seventeenth century, but to these were added chairs in botany, anatomy, midwifery, chemistry, materia medica (the study of the materials, chiefly botanical, from which medicines were prepared), surgery, astronomy, agriculture. The patronage shown by the Town Council paid off: students did come, from home and abroad, and the number of graduates steadily rose.The Town Council's investment in university teaching was shrewdly limited. Professors' salaries were not large. It was intended that the basic salary should be enhanced by a system that strikes terror into the heart of the twentieth-century academic: most of the income of eighteenth-century academics came from class fees paid by students. The stark and salutory implication was that poor lectures, attracting small numbers of students, would generate only a dismal income. Adam Smith, a successful professor at Glasgow University, and advocate of the market economy, recognised the compelling logic of the system:It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest … either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit …(quoted in Chitnis, 1976, p. 140)Chitnis has compiled figures to show that class fees contributed much more to professors' salaries than did their basic salary. At the end of the century, for example, the professor of anatomy boosted a basic salary of fifty pounds to nearly a thousand (p. 152).In sum, then, the milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment was its university cities, where flourished groups of characteristically clubbable intellectuals, divided by no ideological rifts, all committed to the pursuit of natural knowledge, in the general context of a commitment to the improvement of Scotland's, and their own, fortunes. They were supported by civic authorities, by an enterprising commercial culture, by extensive international scholarly contact, and even by the moderate wing of the Church.Within this milieu, a scientific and medical community had, by the middle of the century, reached maturity – a maturity which meant that it was independent of the accidental incidence of a handful of energetic individuals. By 1760 it had built itself an infrastructure of learned societies, journals, specialist university teaching and research, and last, but not least, connections with agriculture and industry. The scientific and medical community could reproduce itself: it wouldn't collapse at the death of one particular and influential member (Christie, 1974).4 The leading figures of the Scottish EnlightenmentAt this point, before we move on to look in greater detail at the work of a couple of characteristic and influential Scottish scientists, it will be useful to stand back and take a survey of the leading members of the scientific and medical community.One of its most eminent members, Adam Smith, pioneered the discipline of economics, which is not customarily included within science today. But to exclude him from our survey would be to misrepresent the unfenced, boundary-free territory across which eighteenth-century intellectuals ranged. Smith was professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University and associated regularly with the leading lights of the European philosophic community. He published the famous Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith's concerns, however, were by no means purely economic. Along with less-well-remembered scholars, he was engaged in one of the fundamental enquiries of the Scottish movement as a whole, namely the enquiry into the nature of humankind and human society.In the field of medicine, the Monro dynasty commands attention. Alexander Monro primus, trained at Leiden, was appointed by the Town Council in 1720 to be professor of anatomy. His grandson, Alexander Monro tertius, held the post in the 1840s, by which time Edinburgh medicine had developed the full range of institutions – university lectures, a teaching hospital, learned journals and societies.It should not be too readily assumed, however, that prestigious and well-supported medical institutions invariably led to improvements in patients' health. Historians of medicine have yet to resolve the question of whether eighteenth-century hospitals enhanced patient's chances of recovery or were, rather, ‘gateways to death’ caused chiefly by infections. The effectiveness of the most brilliant surgical skills – in amputating limbs, or removing urinary stones, for instance – was considerably diminished by shock and post-operative infections. Nor should it be assumed that medicine was solely a metropolitan affair, conducted by a handful of well-to-do physicians, surgeons and their students. Medical handbooks found their way into the households of citizens of moderate means.The most famous of these handbooks is William Buchan's Domestic Medicine, published in 1769 and running to 22 editions by 1822. Buchan was an Edinburgh-trained doctor, and his book embodied the rational, common-sense principles of the Enlightenment. In the absence of antibiotics, medicine was incapable of making spectacular breakthroughs in healing the sick, but books like Buchan's – with its sober calls for moderate living, for publicly-funded inoculation schemes, for an end to superstitious practices in child-birth and child-rearing (he recommended, for example, that fathers should play an active part in rearing their children and ‘ought to assist in every thing that respects either the improvement of the body or the mind’ (1769, p. 7)) – did introduce the new medical thinking into the life of the community and led to modest improvements in its health.Medicine was linked with the physical sciences, notably in the person of William Cullen, who lectured on medicine at Glasgow University before moving to Edinburgh in 1756. There, he combined research and teaching in both medicine and chemistry. He taught on the wards of the new Edinburgh Infirmary, was president of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, as well as holding the chair of chemistry at the university. He was a popular, pivotal figure in Scottish science and had a great influence on the young chemist Joseph Black (see Section 3).5 James Hutton5.1 Early careerJames Hutton (1726–97) conforms fairly closely to Emerson's identikit picture of an intellectual of the Scottish Enlightenment. His chief scientific work was his Theory of the Earth, which was launched at meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785 and eventually expanded and published in two large volumes, ten years later, in 1795.(Scottish National Portrait Gallery) ©Figure 4: James Hutton (1726–97)He was the son of a well-to-do Edinburgh merchant and was educated first at the city's university, where, like many students, he was particularly interested in chemistry. From Edinburgh University he took what was the natural route for young men who were keen to extend their studies in science: he went to Paris, and from there to the university which features again and again in the background to the Scottish Enlightenment – Leiden, in the Netherlands. The presiding spirit at Leiden was that of the doctor and chemist Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738). Boerhaave's ideas influenced a generation of students, including those who returned to Scotland to establish the Edinburgh Medical School in 1726. Although Hutton graduated as a doctor at Leiden in 1749, he never practised regularly.Instead, he returned to Edinburgh and set up a profitable chemical works which produced sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) – a substance used as a flux in the metalworking trades and in the textile industry. Typically, Hutton was not averse to dirtying his hands, either with chemicals or with trade. Equally typically, he did not rest content as a successful chemicals manufacturer, but moved on into agriculture when he inherited two farms. He studied the latest agricultural techniques with a view to introducing them on his farms.Farming, like the chemical industry, was unable to sustain his interest, and he moved on to geology. In making this move, though, he was able to take with him much of the knowledge he had derived from his earlier enterprises. Farming had prompted his interest in the structure of the earth's crust. Drainage schemes and quarrying opened sections through earth and rock which intrigued him, and in pursuit of his twin interests in agricultural improvement and the structure of the landscape, he travelled extensively around Scotland.Eventually, in 1767, Hutton returned to Edinburgh, where he slotted comfortably into the Enlightenment milieu. He associated with Adam Smith, Joseph Black, the historian William Robertson, the anthropologist Lord Monboddo and the engineer James Watt. Through Watt, he met the members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group of scientists, engineers and industrialists from the English Midlands. In short, Hutton was closely in touch with activities in a host of related and vigorous areas of enquiry.5.2 Background to Theory of the EarthThe two volumes of Theory of the Earth embody a startlingly original conception of the processes which shape the earth's surface, and they contain some vivid observations, drawn from Hutton's travels. However, they are poorly organised, repetitive and sometimes obscure. In a most helpful survey of Hutton's work, from which this section draws liberally, Jean Jones quotes from a wonderfully direct letter that a saddlesore Hutton wrote while on a field-trip in Wales: ‘Lord pity the arse that's clagged to a head that will hunt stones’ (Jones, 1986b, p. 127). Such admirable conciseness is absent from the Theory, but the two volumes are a foundation text in the science of geology, and are well worth exploring.This brief account of his life stresses the practical and commercial aspects of Hutton's life. However, another influence is at work in his geological theorising: the book is very far from a handbook for coal prospectors. It is a grand attempt, as its title indicates, to establish the principles which govern the structure and shape of the earth's crust. Given the materials with which Hutton worked – rivers, rocks, volcanoes, oceans, fossils – it is plain that he could never formulate neat mathematical laws to account for landforms, but the drive of his theorising is always to describe geological processes in terms of the interplay of two contending natural forces: elevation and erosion.It is equally plain that Hutton's work was inspired and regulated by his deistic religious beliefs. Deists put aside the Christian Revelation, with its scripture, miracles and incarnation, in favour of an unimpassioned belief in a Divine Architect whose sole purpose was to set the universe running. In so doing, deists who happened also to be geologists put aside the account in the book of Genesis of the formation and history of the world. Christians, on the other hand, were gripped by the powerful story of the seven days of Creation, of God's subsequent anger and the Flood. Not until the nineteenth century, and for some Christians not even then, did non-literal readings of the biblical Creation story start to make headway.Hutton's deism enabled him to sidestep all problems of harmonising his theory with scripture. One of the remarkable features of the Theory of the Earth is the absence of references to the account of Creation which had possessed the European imagination for nigh on two thousand years: the Genesis story seems to have faded almost clean away in the blaze of the Enlightenment. Hutton made only oblique, but entirely civil, references to the biblical account. Here, for example, is how he handles the idea of the Flood:Philosophers observing an apparent disorder and confusion in the solid parts of this globe, have been led to conclude, that there formerly existed a more regular and uniform state, in the constitution of this earth; that there had happened some destructive change; and that the original structure of the earth had been broken and disturbed by some violent operation, whether natural, or from a supernatural cause.He goes on to say that his own theory gives a perfectly satisfactory account of the phenomena supposedly resulting from a great cataclysm, and concludes:Therefore, there is no occasion for having recourse to any unnatural supposition of evil, to any destructive accident in nature, or to the agency of any preternatural [i.e. supernatural] cause, in explaining that which actually appears.(Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 1, pp. 165–6)This is not to say that religious belief played no part in his theorising. On the contrary, it was a powerful stimulus. Hutton's fundamental belief was that the earth has been formed for a purpose. That purpose is the support of life, and especially human life. Furthermore, in Hutton's view, the discovery of the way in which this purpose has been achieved leads enquirers to a noble conception of the Divine Architect.Hutton's belief in a wise providential ordering of a world which, no matter how it changes, is always bountifully equipped to support life is not just a polite decoration to his work. It actively regulates his theorising. This teleological view, stressing the purposeful drive towards an end, leads Hutton to assume, for example, that no matter how radically the face of the earth has been remodelled during geological time there has always been a harmonious relationship between land-mass and ocean: he could not conceive of the possibility of there ever having been a time when life on land was impossible. ‘It is only required’, he wrote, ‘that at all times, there should be a just proportion of land and water upon the surface of the globe, for the purpose of a habitable world’ (Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 1, p. 196).The purpose of a ‘habitable world’ is Hutton's answer to the teleological question ‘What is the earth for?’. Moreover, in characteristically Enlightenment fashion, Hutton declares further that life is essentially happy:It is of importance to the happiness of man, to find consummate wisdom in the constitution of this earth, by which things are so contrived that nothing is wanting, in the bountiful provision of nature, for the pleasure and propagation of created beings; more particularly of those [i.e. humans] who live in order to know their happiness, and know their happiness on purpose to see the bountiful source from whence it flows.(Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 2, p. 183)Such cheerful sentiments are a long way from the Christian tradition, strong in Scottish Calvinism, which asserted humanity's sinfulness.5.3 Hutton's geology: ‘No vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’Geologists are engaged on the business of reconstructing the earth's past and determining the agents of geological change. The only documentary evidence of the earth's origins and ancient past, and of the agents that had caused change, available to Hutton was the book of Genesis, and he had sceptically put it aside, along with miracles. But what if the processes that are presently observable were to be taken as the key to the past? How far might geological enquiry go with the assumption that what is now going on is all that has ever gone on – that the modern world presents an exhaustive catalogue of the processes that have shaped the world, and are continuing to shape it?Hutton's originality lies in his readiness to go all the way with this assumption. He produced a theory which pictured an earth in which ‘the purpose of a habitable world’ has perpetually been achieved by a set of perfectly balanced agents of natural destruction and renewal. Earth history has no direction: it is now, and always has and will be, in a steady-state. The challenge to the geologist is to show how the steady-state is maintained – to make a survey of the agencies of destruction and renewal at work in the landscape.What were Hutton's agents of destruction and renewal? Briefly, he argued that rocks are formed at the bottom of the sea and are composed, first, of material eroded from the neighbouring landmasses. Continents are inexorably being eroded away, and their fragments are washed down rivers to the sea. Secondly, rocks are composed of the remains of sea-dwelling animals: calcareous rocks – limestones, chalk, marble – simply are the consolidated remains of countless populations of shellfish whose shells have sunk to the sea-bed. All this material, either from former continents or from former living things, consolidates on the sea-bed where, under pressure from the sea, it is baked by the subterranean heat of the globe (a heat which, in Hutton's view can be reliably inferred from the action of volcanoes). As ancient continents are relentlessly ground away, subterranean heat slowly upheaves sea-beds elsewhere and new continents are born. Nothing is permanent: all is in a flux of destruction and renewal.In Hutton's account, geological time is directionless – it's not going anywhere: the earth has proceeded from no primeval state, and it will not culminate at some future final point. The steady-state of a habitable world can be projected backwards into the eternal vistas of the past, and can confidently be predicted, stretching into the equally endless vistas of the future. ‘Time’, he wrote, ‘is to nature endless and as nothing’ (Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 1, p. 15). And in one of the most memorable utterances in the history of geology – one in which Hutton exhibited an uncharacteristic eloquence – he concluded that his researches have shown that the present landscape is built from the materials of former landscapes, which in turn are built from yet earlier landscapes, which in turn stretch back in endless succession. Sounding the standard, eighteenth-century Newtonian note, Hutton wrote:For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for anything higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end.(Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 1, p. 200)How could Hutton be so confident that he could find ‘no vestige of a beginning’? Other geologists had affirmed that rock strata could be sorted into a single sequence, stretching from ‘primitive’ rocks, formed when the world was young, up to modern rocks. Knowledge of the fossils (remains of living things) which characterise each rock formation was sketchy, but it seemed clear that there were rocks, low down in the sequence, which contained no fossils at all. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to say that the earth has developed uniquely, from a primitive, lifeless condition up to the present. Hutton challenged this by saying that there was, in effect, no such thing as a primitive rock. All rocks, no matter how low in the sequence, no matter how contorted, were formed, he argued, from the sorts of material that are still abundant in the world, and by the processes that are still observably at work in the landscape. If no fossils can be found in them, it is because they have been obliterated by the pressure and the heat which produced the strata.Hutton's prosaic writing rarely does justice to the huge imaginative leap he made in grasping the explanatory potential of small, mundane modifications to the landscape – like the rolling of rocks downstream by rivers, or the accumulation of seashells on the sea-bed – when these modifications are given indefinite time in which to accumulate. It was remarkable to have been able to contemplate a mountainous country like Scotland, built seemingly of durable and stable rock, as, on one hand, having been built from strata laid down aeons ago beneath now vanished oceans, and, on the other, as potential raw material from which, in the immeasurably distant future, a new continent would be formed.5.4 Hutton's geology: The Jedburgh unconformityOne concrete example from the Theory of the Earth will perhaps indicate the way in which Hutton could read features of the landscape as evidence of the action of forces acting over immeasurably long periods. He had been geologising in the valley of Jed Water, near Jedburgh, in the Borders area between England and Scotland. From his observations in the neighbouring Teviot valley, he expected the Jed to be running over a bed of horizontally laid, soft strata which were sometimes exposed as sections alongside the river. However, in his own words:I was surprised with the appearance of vertical strata in the bed of the river, where I was certain that the banks were composed of horizontal strata. I was soon satisfied with regard to this phenomenon, and rejoiced at my good fortune in stumbling upon an object so interesting to the natural history of the earth, and which I had been long looking for in vain.… above those vertical strata, are placed the horizontal beds, which extend along the whole country.(Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 1, p. 432, my italics)What Hutton had found was what is now known as an ‘unconformity’: a junction between sets of rocks of quite different types, formed at quite different epochs. The Jedburgh unconformity was sketched by Hutton's travelling colleague, John Clerk, and appeared as a delightful engraving in the Theory of the Earth (see Figure 5).(Reproduced by permission of the British Library Board.) ©Figure 5: Unconformity near Jedburgh (From Hutton, Theory of the Earth, vol. 1, Edinburgh, 1795, plate 3.)How was the unconformity to be explained? Hutton proceeds, in the Theory of the Earth, by eliminating what he considers to be unsatisfactory explanations. For example, it is difficult to imagine that the upper, horizontal strata could have been laid down before the vertical strata beneath them: this would entail the subterranean building of vertical strata which somehow were ‘cut off abruptly’, in a straight edge, at the level where they met the overlying horizontal strata. Hutton rejects a number of other possibilities and then advances his own explanation. The strata which are now vertical were, like nearly all rocks, laid down horizontally, beneath the sea. As they were upheaved to form land, they were twisted into the vertical. Thenby the effects of either rivers, winds, or tides, the surface of the vertical strata had been washed bare; and … this surface had been afterwards sunk [beneath the sea] below the influence of these destructive operations, and thus placed in a situation proper for the opposite effect, the accumulation of matter prepared and put in motion by the destroying causes.(Hutton, [1795] 1959, vol. 1, p. 435)That is to say, the upheaved vertical strata had been planed down by erosion, and had sunk again to the bottom of the ocean to become the bed upon which a new set of horizontal strata began to accumulate. Hutton fortifies this suggestion by pointing to the layer of boulders and stones that occur at the intersection of the two sets of strata: they are, he claims, fragments of the lower, vertical series, which became detached during the long period of erosion.Now, this may all look a bit confusing to a reader unfamiliar with geology, or commonplace to a reader who knows the basics of the science, but it is worth spelling it out, in order to show the confidence with which Hutton could, with perfect equanimity, contemplate the building and erosion of huge landmasses.In the case of Jedburgh, he postulated the following sequence. There was once an ocean, where Jedburgh now stands, in which collected both the detritus of the neighbouring landmass and the detritus of tiny marine organisms. Horizontal beds of rock, composed of this detritus, were consolidated at the bottom of the ocean. Then, there was a period of upheaval which twisted and raised these beds vertically above the sea, where they were exposed to weathering and erosion for sufficient time for them to be planed down to a level.A period of subsidence followed, during which the rocks sank below the ocean again. A new sequence of horizontal sedimentary rocks consolidated on the base of the old, subsiding rocks. Lastly, the whole mass was upheaved yet again. Finally, the unconformity revealed itself to Hutton in the spectacular section cut by the humble river Jed. ‘Finally’, though is the wrong word to use, for Hutton said that there is ‘no prospect of an end’, the forces that wrought these titanic changes are still at work and will eventually drastically remodel the Borders landscape.It took the best part of a century for Hutton's vision, transmitted through later geologists, to be sanctified, as it were, by the elite English culture and embodied famously in the verse of the English Poet Laureate Tennyson in the most widely read poem of the nineteenth century:There rolls the deep where grew the tree.O earth, what changes hast thou seen!There where the long street roars, hath beenThe stillness of the central sea.The hills are shadows, and they flowFrom form to form, and nothing stands;They melt like mist, the solid lands,Like clouds they shape themselves and go.(In Memoriam, 1850, section 123, lines 1–8)6 Joseph Black6.1 A lifelong academicHutton can in many ways stand as a representative of the intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment. But they were not entirely homogeneous in their intellectual and religious outlooks. The chemist Joseph Black (1728–99) was a close friend of James Hutton (and Adam Smith), but the two men were quite different. Whereas Hutton was robust and disorganised, Black was pallid and precise. Hutton operated outside the universities, but Black was a lifelong academic. If Hutton gained his interest in geology from his industrial and farming activities, Black came to chemistry from his medical studies. Whereas Hutton was keen to speculate about the origins of the earth, even calling his book Theory of the Earth, Black insisted that it was only the facts that counted, and deplored all speculation and theorising. Similarly, Hutton (like Black's colleague Cullen) made no secret of his deism, but Black's religious views remain an enigma even today and they played no part in his scientific work.(Photo: National Library of Scotland.) ©Figure 6: James Hutton (1726–97) and Joseph Black (1729–99) (From J. Kay, A Descriptive Catalogue of Original Portraits, Edinburgh, 1836)It would therefore be rash to assume that a case-study of a single figure, even one as illustrious as Hutton, can provide us with a complete picture of Scottish science in the eighteenth century. What light does Black's scientific activities shed on the Scottish Enlightenment and what were his major contributions to the development of European science?Joseph Black was born in April 1728, not in Scotland but in France, the son of an Ulsterman, who was a wine merchant in Bordeaux, and his Scottish wife. After four years' education in Belfast, Black went to Glasgow University at the age of sixteen. Pressed by his father to choose a profession after he completed his arts course in 1748, Black decided to take up medicine. Black was not particularly interested in becoming a physician, but the medical course enabled him to continue the study of natural philosophy under the new lecturer in chemistry, William Cullen (1710–90). This was a crucial step in Black's career, for Cullen was one of the first teachers of chemistry in British medical school to base his course on the general principles of chemistry, rather than materia medica.6.2 Early research in Edinburgh6.2.1 Magnesia albaAfter four years with Cullen in Glasgow, Black transferred to Edinburgh to complete his medical studies. He then needed to select a topic for his MD dissertation, one which would involve chemistry, be of topical interest, and also touch upon a medical question. He decided to study the nature of causticity, the corrosive character of alkaline substances, such as quicklime (calcium oxide). He wrote to his father in December 1752 that he had chosen this topic because of a controversy between two Edinburgh medical professors, Robert Whytt (1714–66) and Charles Alston (1683–1760), stemming from their attempts to use limewater (a solution of calcium hydroxide in water) as a chemical means of dissolving excruciating urinary stones (Donovan, 1975, p. 172).Rather than become directly entangled in a dispute between two professors, Black chose another alkaline substance for his own investigations. This was magnesia alba (magnesium carbonate), which was of medical significance because it was taken (and is still widely used) for acidic indigestion and, to quote Black, ‘it mildly loosens the bowels’ (quoted by Donovan, 1975, p. 193). This was important in a period when overeating of the wrong things and drinking often caused indigestion and constipation. His thesis, De humore acido a cibis orto et magnesia alba (Of the acid humour produced by food and of magnesia alba), was printed in June 1754.He did not achieve his original aim of producing a substitute for limewater by roasting magnesia and treating the product with water, because magnesium oxide, unlike quicklime, is totally insoluble in water. Nonetheless, Black carried out about thirty chemical experiments on magnesia and calcinated magnesia, which he called magnesia usta. The tentative and disappointing results of Black's thesis were transformed a year later in an essay he read to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh entitled ‘Experiments on magnesia alba, quicklime, and other alcaline substances’, in which he extended his investigations to quicklime and potash.6.2.2 Fixed airIt was well known that ‘air’ was given off by magnesia (or limestone) when treated with acids. Black sought to show that this ‘air’, which he called ‘fixed air’ (carbon dioxide), is also lost when magnesia is heated. Hampered by practical difficulties in his efforts to collect the fixed air liberated during the heating of magnesia, Black used a series of chemical reactions to prove his argument. He dissolved the magnesia usta in sulphuric acid to produce a solution of Epsom salt. This solution was treated with fixed alkali (potassium carbonate), which precipitated magnesia. This regenerated magnesia, after being washed and dried, had the weight and the properties of the original compound.As very little ‘air’ was given off during this sequence, the fixed air in the fixed alkali must have ended up in the magnesia. Black confirmed this by treating magnesia with sulphuric acid and then measuring the weight lost during this reaction, which was equal to the weight loss during calcination.Black also noted that quicklime does not absorb ordinary air, but only the small quantity of fixed air contained in it. This implied that there were at least two chemically distinct ‘airs’, and Black knew that fixed air extinguished a candle. However, he was not interested in the chemical behaviour of gases, and although he carried out experiments which revealed that birds were unable to breathe in fixed air, he did not make any further contributions to the pneumatic chemistry he had so ably helped to found.)6.3 Heat researchAndrew Plummer (c. 1698–1756), the chemistry professor at Edinburgh, suffered a stroke in 1755, and the Town Council appointed Cullen as his conjoint professor without consulting the stricken Plummer. Black, who had covered for Plummer until Cullen arrived, was appointed to Cullen's position at the University of Glasgow. This move also marked a change in the direction of Black's research. He now began to investigate the nature of heat, a central topic in eighteenth-century chemistry.It is important to realise that most chemists in this period regarded heat as a substance, if perhaps one without measurable weight, and the study of heat was therefore considered an appropriate field for chemists. Hermann Boerhaave devoted a long section to ‘fire’ in his famous Elementa chemise (1732). In his lectures, Cullen listed ‘fire’ as the second primary cause of chemical change, after the elective attraction (chemical affinity) – precisely the order of Black's research (Donovan, 1975, p. 131). Black doubtlessly believed that some form of chemical combination took place between heated materials, such as water, and heat. At the same time, however, he was even more reluctant to hypothesise than Cullen. His work on latent and specific heats was not based on any theoretical foundation, except for a belief that substances possessed a capacity to take up heat.It is thus unwise to regard Black's research as constructing a theory of heat. Black simply sought to make clear the manner in which a given substance, most notably water, absorbed heat. This was in keeping with the Enlightenment philosophy that it was important to establish the causes of natural phenomena by examining the facts, without resorting to speculative assumptions or ‘hypotheses’. As he later explained to his former assistant John Robison (1739–1805), he considered every hypothetical explanation as a mere waste of time and ingenuity‘ (in Robison, 1803, vol. 1, p. vii).6.3.1 Latent heatThe origins of Black's interest in the phenomenon of melting have been the subject of some debate. John Robison remarked, in his edition of Black's lectures, that Black had been struck by the simple fact that snow does not melt instantly on a sunny winter's day nor does a sharp night-time frost cause ponds to form thick layers of ice immediately (Robison, 1803, vol. 1, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii). It is now generally agreed, however, that Black's interest in heat arose from his study of the temperature changes which take place when salts dissolve in water. Some salts give out heat, while others produce cold, and these differences forced him to think about the more general question of aggregation and heat.Several scholars, notably Henry Guerlac (1982, pp. 15–16), regard Black's reflections on the observation of supercooling by Daniel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) as the crucial factor. (Supercooling is the phenomenon whereby the temperature of undisturbed chilled water can fall below 32°F without freezing, but when the water is shaken, the thermometer rises to 32°F and remains there until all the water has frozen.) Arthur Donovan (1975, pp. 224–5) argues that Black would have perceived a link between the fixing of ‘air’ by quicklime and the fixing of heat (so that it is no longer registered by the thermometer) by ice.However he came to the question of why ice does not melt immediately the temperature rises above freezing, Black's experimental programme is clear. If the temperature – as measured by a thermometer – does not change while the ice is melting, can we be sure that the thermometer bears any relationship to heat at all, and if the temperature does not change, how can we measure the quantity of heat taken up by the ice? Black was able to confirm that a mercury thermometer was a reasonably accurate record of heat changes when no change of state occurred, by mixing equal volumes of hot and cold water and assuming that the temperature of the mixture was the average of the initial temperatures.But how could the heat entering the melting ice be measured with the thermometer? Fortunately, Black recalled an experiment that a Scottish physician George Martine (1702–41) had published in 1740. He had put two thin glasses, one containing water and the other mercury, in front of a fire; if the fire is a steady one, the quantity of heat entering each vessel should be the same. Black adapted the idea by measuring the rise in temperature of water in one glass, while ice was melting in another one.He had to wait for the winter to arrive so he could obtain the necessary ice, and the key experiment was made in December 1761. One glass contained water that had been frozen using a snow and salt mixture and the other held water that had been chilled to 33°F; the room temperature was 47°F. After half an hour, the water temperature had risen to 40°F, but the ice took ten and a half hours to reach the same temperature. Black calculated that the extra heat required to melt the ice – its latent heat – was equal to the heat required to raise the temperature of the water by 140°F. The term ‘latent heat’ was devised by Black from the Latin latet, ‘hidden’ (Robison, 1803, vol. 1, pp. xxxvii).He then carried out a different experiment, which he later described as an ‘obvious method’ (Black, 1803, vol. 1, p. 122). He made a small block of ice, which was placed in hot water. Within a few seconds, the ice had melted and the temperature of the water had fallen from 190°F to 53°F. The ice, the mixture of melted ice and water, and the empty glass were all weighed. With this information, Black recalculated the latent heat of ice and the result this time was 143°F. The average was therefore 141.5°F, or 330 KJ/Kg in the modem SI system, close to the currently accepted value of 336 KJ/Kg.6.3.2 Heat of vaporisationBlack read a paper on these experiments to the Glasgow Literary Society in April 1762, and then turned to the investigation of vaporisation. For reasons he himself found difficult to explain, Black was initially reluctant to accept that there was a similar heat of vaporisation. This was in spite of the fact that he (and presumably many cooks) had observed that it takes far longer to boil off water than it takes to raise water to boiling point. In October 1762, he devised a very simple experiment to measure the heat of vaporisation. He took a flat-bottomed tinplated pan and heated small quantities of water in it, using a steady furnace. Knowing the initial temperature of the water (50°F), the time it took to reach boiling point (four minutes) and the extra time it took to boil off (twenty minutes), he could calculate the heat of vaporisation. The quantity he obtained was 810°F. (This is equivalent to 1890 KJ/Kg, rather less than the modern value of 2268 KJ/Kg.)Almost exactly two years later, Black and his student William Irvine carried out the reverse experiment, namely the determination of the heat liberated when steam is condensed to water. Once again, Black displayed his penchant for the simplest apparatus. He used an ordinary laboratory still fitted with a condenser filled with water (at 52°F). The quantity of water condensed was measured and found to be at 132°F. The temperature of the water in the condenser was at 123°F. From this data, Black and Irvine calculated that the latent heat of steam was at least 774°F. This was obviously too low, but it was close enough to the 810°F Black obtained for the conversion of water to steam to show that the two processes were probably equal and opposite.Black's work on the heat of vaporisation provides us with an early example of the interaction between science and technology, because Black and Robison were close friends of James Watt (1736–1819), the pioneer of steam power. Watt was born in Greenock, but he trained as a scientific instrument-maker in London. On his return to Glasgow in 1757, he was appointed instrument-maker to the university, probably through his friendship with Professor Robert Dick, who may have introduced Watt to Black. Black and Watt entered a partnership with Alexander Wilson, later professor of astronomy, in November 1758.6.3.3 Specific heatsFinally, we must consider Black's contribution to the discovery of specific heats, the fact that different substances take up heat at different rates. Two experiments on mercury and water had indicated the problem. Fahrenheit had found that mixing equal volumes of mercury and water produced a striking result. If the mercury was initially hotter than the water, the temperature of the mixture was less than the average, and the reverse was true if the water was originally hotter. Martine's experiment, which we have met in connection with the latent heat of ice, shed more light on this matter. When two glasses, one containing water and the other an equal volume of mercury, were placed in front of a steady fire, the temperature of the mercury rose twice as rapidly as the water.Black was able to solve these riddles. Mercury clearly had a lower capacity for heat than water, and hence it heated up (and cooled down) more rapidly. As he never published his conclusions, we know very little about his thinking on this question, but he may have arrived at this solution because he regarded the absorption of heat as a chemical process, and hence a function of chemical composition, rather than density, or bulk (as Boerhaave had suggested).6.4 The Edinburgh professorshipWhytt, the Edinburgh professor of medicine, died in 1766 and Cullen was chosen to succeed him, largely with the aim of freeing the chemistry chair for Black. Black's transfer to Edinburgh was well received, and he fulfilled these expectations by being an excellent and popular lecturer. However, the Edinburgh chair also marked the end of his active research. One looks in vain for any sequel to his research on magnesia or his work on heat. With hindsight, foreshadowings of this change can be seen in Black's Glasgow period. He refused to publish his work on heat, and it was only made public when an unauthorised version, based on his lectures, appeared in 1770. Furthermore, in his last years in Glasgow, most of the research work was done by his assistants, William Irvine and John Robison.However, the reasons are not too hard to find. He did not draw a salary as a professor, but had to rely on his lecture fees, and hence the number of students attracted to his course. Black's stock-in-trade was the elegant (rather than spectacular) lecture demonstration. With over 120 lectures to prepare and deliver between November and May, it doubtlessly reduced Black's scope for research, given his indifferent health. Black had become increasingly worried about his health – he had a bad chest – and probably felt that he did not have to prove his talents in chemistry now he had achieved his ambition of an Edinburgh chair.Furthermore, he was an active physician, and while his private practice was small, he was also a manager of the Royal Infirmary and eventually a ‘Physician to the King in Scotland’, in addition to his work on the sixth to eighth revisions of the Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia.His medical work was overshadowed by his growing role as an adviser to industry. To quote Robert Anderson, a leading authority on Black:Black was consulted by a considerable number of industrialists on an extraordinary wide range of topics. In the surviving correspondence these include sugar refining, alkali production, bleaching, ceramic glazing, dyeing, brewing,metal corrosion, salt extraction, glass making, mineral composition, water analysis and vinegar manufacture. In addition his opinion was sought on agricultural matters. (Anderson, 1986, p. W7)For instance, Black suggested that caustic potash (potassium hydroxide), prepared by the action of quicklime on potash, was a better bleach for linen than potash or sour milk. At first, the authorities were concerned that caustic potash would weaken the cloth, but the Irish Linen Board permitted its use in 1770.Black never changed the structure of his lectures from his arrival in Edinburgh until his retirement 30 years later. While he updated individual items over the years, the unchanging structure became an obvious handicap in a period when chemistry was transformed. Clearly, the pressure on Black's time and his poor health partly explain the lack of any thorough revision, but it was also a reflection of Black's lack of interest in theoretical chemistry. He presented the phlogiston theory propagated by the English pneumatic chemists in his lectures without any great enthusiasm; their speculative conjectures were not to his taste. However, he was equally chary of the new chemistry from France, especially its systematic nomenclature.The agent of change was Sir James Hall (1761–1832), a pupil of Black and James Hutton, who visited Paris in 1786. The earlier influence of an uncle and the heady experience of meeting Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94) converted Hall to the new chemistry. On his return to Scotland, he gave a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on ‘M. Lavoisier's new theory of chemistry’ in the spring of 1788. Hutton defended the phlogiston theory in a later paper, but Black was characteristically silent. However, Lavoisier wrote to Black in September 1789 to inform him that he had been elected a foreign member of the French Academy of Sciences. It appears from a second letter from Lavoisier in July 1790 that Black had spoken guardedly in favour of Lavoisier's ideas. In a warm response to this second letter, Black declared his support for Lavoisier's chemistry, despite a few ‘difficultys’, and confirmed that he had begun to teach it in his lectures (text of letter in Donovan, 1979, p. 245).Although Black was now in his sixties, his eloquence and his dexterity with apparatus could still command the admiration of Henry Brougham (later Baron Brougham) in 1796. This was the last course Black delivered, and he handed his lecturing duties over to his former student Thomas Charles Hope (1766–1844), who had been converted to Lavoisier's teachings by Sir James Hall in 1788. Black's health now began to fail altogether, and he died suddenly in 1799.Black had built up the reputation of the teaching of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, but it did not continue to prosper after his death. Part of the blame must be laid at the feet of his successor, Hope, who has been described as ‘dull, pompous and uninspiring’ (Anderson, 1986, p. 112). The Edinburgh tradition of teaching and lecture demonstrations to the exclusion of original research meant that it was unable to meet the challenge from the research-based German universities, most notably Giessen, in the 1840s.Black's failure to prepare Edinburgh for the nineteenth century, and his personal failure to build on his initial achievements, can be traced to his indifferent health and his personality. Adam Smith once described his close friend as ‘cool and steady’ (Mossner and Ross, 1977, p. 207). Black was a cautious and fastidious man, with a desire for precision, who was not given to enthusiasm and rash actions, amongst which he appears to have numbered scientific publications. It is significant that his only important publication, ‘Experiments upon magnesia alba’, was a direct consequence of his MD thesis. This unfortunate mixture of indolence and coolness limited Black's contribution to the Chemical Revolution.Black's work on latent heat laid the foundations for Lavoisier's theory of heat as a weightless chemical element, caloric. But Black was more than an intellectual bridge between Newton and Lavoisier. By treating heat as a measurable quantity, which could be transferred from one body to another, Black paved the way for the development of thermodynamics, the science of heat, in the nineteenth century.7 ConclusionWe have studied James Hutton and Joseph Black separately, but they can be properly understood only if they are considered as part of the close-knit community of philosophers and scientists which also included Adam Smith, David Hume, William Cullen and Dugald Stewart. For nearly seventy years of the eighteenth century, this group produced an intellectual ferment which placed Scotland at the forefront of the European Enlightenment.By the end of the eighteenth century, Scotland had a mature scientific community, producing work which fed into both the wider European scientific and medical networks, and into Scotland's own developing industrial economy. The members of this community shared a common belief in the importance of reason, the goodness of humankind, and the serenity of nature. Equally, they shared a zeal for the commercial and agricultural improvement of Scotland's and their own fortunes. They were pioneers in several fields, particularly medicine, chemistry, geology, philosophy and economics. The advances they made underpinned the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution.What was, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a small, poor, politically and culturally disorientated country, had, towards the end of that century, achieved a commanding status as one of the European centres of Enlightenment thought and practice.Thankfully in 2014 at a “Once in a Lifetime” vote, we chose to remain part of a country that stands for freedom, justice and upholding the United Nations Charter. The people for example in the Falklands had freedom and justice and self-determination. They now have it once again. We stand for upholding international law, that means that you must honour the borders of other people's countries, otherwise there is no international law, there is only international anarchy. We stand for self-determination. There was a referendum in 2014 and of course it was won overwhelmingly by those who wished to stay with the United Kingdom. The fact is that the majority of the people in Scotland wish to stay a part of the United Kingdom—that is our right to self-determination. It is a right under the United Nations Charter, it is a right which we enjoy as part of the UK, it is a right which is enjoyed in all democratic countries.Just in case anyone still thinks that the SNP and wider Scottish Independence movement is “Joyous & Civic”.Is it surprising that these nationalists who are in the main socialist will stoop to any level to subvert the natural will of the people of Scotland and create grievances where there are none?Is it any wonder that a majority of Scots do not back these nationalists?

THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR GETTING STARTED IN MUSIC COMPOSITIONTHE BEST BOOKS TO READ TO PURSUE MUSIC COMPOSITIONSome of these books might surprise you.Before the best books are revealed, let’s go back twenty years to 1998, and look at some secrets that we composers have learned along the way…It was summer of 1998. I was a high school junior trying to choose what I wanted to do. Like many others, my parents had a hands off approach to helping me choose my career. Bad idea. I wasn’t prepared to apply to music school for composition.Compare this to a friend whose parents got him:Music lessons from the best.Traveled to another city when the best wasn’t good enough.Schmoozed the music schools with donations.Traveled with their son to the music school and grilled the professors.Researched, researched, researched, until they knew what schools could get their son the career he wanted.Pushed their son to take any singing gig he could before school started. (Macaroni Grill anyone?)Carefully laid plan of rich parents = full time career in opera with some great opera companies. That’s phenomenal.For us who don’t have the benefit of money and parenting, we have to slog it out.Dismal??Nope.Because that’s not the end of the story.HERE’S THE #1 SECRET THAT I WAS MISSING:But first, why was I missing this most important secret?Well to see that we go back even further back to our parent’s generation. Or to society’s concept of how a career works.You want to become a dentist? Then you go to dental school.You want to be an engineer? Go to engineering school.You want to be a composer? Go to composer school???Can becoming a composer really be like becoming a dentist? Let’s do a comparison:Dentist:Demand:Everyone has a mouth.Most people have teeth.Most people drink and eat sugary foods that give them cavities and gum disease.Gum disease and cavities hurt, so people need to go to the dentist for relief.Dentist oftentimes funded by an employer.So demand for dentist. Check. ✓Supply:Dentists have to go through rigorous training. Biochem, mathematics, anatomy and physiology block out the underachievers.Many people don’t want to look down other people’s throats and smell bad breath all day.Many overachievers want to do something even more lucrative, such as surgery or anesthesiology.So supply of dentists = Not too many. Check. ✓That’s a great recipe. Means that you’ll almost be guaranteed to make money as long as you get your degree.Composer:Demand for composersBarely anyone goes to concerts.Barely any concerts (for classical) want new music.Many films/ads/shows don’t need music. Or will just use music libraries. Or get their cousin who “knows music” to do it for free.Music is funded less and less by the US government.No demand for composer. Unfortunately, check. ✓Supply of composers:Composer training is not as rigorous because… if the music’s bad, you don’t kill an audience.Everybody wants to write music.Many underachievers are writing music because it is “easier.”Supply of composers = way too many. Unfortunately, check. ✓So the recipe is almost the complete opposite! But yet my parents, and maybe yours, would have you go to music school without the proper preparation.By now you’ve probably figured out this first secret for yourself.THE #1 WAY PEOPLE HAVE MISLEAD ME, AND POSSIBLY YOU, ABOUT A MUSIC COMPOSITION CAREER. SECRET #1:Music composition is not a career like being a doctor or dentist.You cannot just get a degree and say, “phew, I’m set for life.”Does that mean that you can’t get a job as a composer?Nope.The career just might be different from what you think right now. Different from what our society and parents have trained us to think. So here’s the big question:Are you the type of person who is more interested in living a life with comforts? Are you the type who’d rather take a career as a dentist? If so, stop reading this, go and search on Quora for how to get started as a dentist.Or…Are you the type of person who loves music more than anything else and wants to make it, and knows you can beat the competition? If so—WHY SOME PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU THE TRUTHA myth about who’s doing well in music composition.Here’s the thing: composers don’t want to tell you the truth about music composition.They don’t want to tell you their secrets, because they don’t want you to become a competitor.There’s a secret they haven’t told you. In fact, they might have lied to themselves enough times, that they believe the lie.SECRET #2: Many composers are successful through luck.Don’t believe me? Here’s an example.How did Bear McCreary (Composer for Battlestar Galactica) do so well? House-sitting for the famous Elmer Bernstein. You’d get far too if you had that opportunity.And I’m not downplaying Bear’s achievement because he’s worked hard, writing music for thousands of shows. I’m just saying that if he hadn’t house sat for Bernstein in Santa Barbara—poof—his career would be gone.We are ego driven creatures. Anything good happens, we say, “What a good job I did.” Anything bad happens, we say, “I have bad luck,” or “It’s someone else’s fault.”Really a lot of things are up to luck. Many composers’ careers follow the same pattern of luck-and-reward, but they’ll never admit it.Are You A Lucky Person?You might be wondering how to compete with other composers who have amazing luck.Here’s the thing—No matter who you are, no matter what part of the world you live in, you can consider yourself lucky… That’s because there are many people less fortunate than you.Just think about what you have that they don’t. Those are your lucky advantages.By reading this article you are already increasing your luck. You have been searching for answers, and you found this page. Many people don’t have the advantage that you now have. They aren’t able to read the recommendations below and make an informed decision.By seeking answers you actually followed the next secret, secret #3.But before I get to that secret, here’s a story about how I discovered it.How Saying Yes Can Lead to SuccessOne my fiancé and I were at a dinner for the college I attended. I was sort of a meet and greet with the board of the college. There was an owner of some premium shopping space in Beverly Hills. We got to talking and it turned out that he had heard a composer play at his own home one time, and as he tells it, “And the composer was playing at the piano but wasn’t reading any notes. I walked over to ask him what he was playing. And you know what? He was making it up on the spot. Isn’t that amazing?”So I saw an opportunity. We had built rapport, and so I sent the member of the board a hand-written letter, asking for his help to make an orchestral piece of mine a reality. I focused the letter on the college mission. I got a private commission from that. He also commissioned me to write a piece for his wife’s birthday, (which is what he really wanted.)I was getting an inkling about secret #3, but it was a mystery to me. The next event helped me get closer.One day, when I was a teacher at a community college, I overheard some people talking about music. By taking the chance of introducing myself to strangers, I ended up getting a performance from that conversation. I also partnered up with a sound engineer and worked with his company, Orpheum Music LLC, for the next 8 years.Talk about being stubborn … I still didn’t figure out secret #3 until after getting hired to do an arrangement with the Dallas String Quartet at a convention center. After we worked together, I approached the string quartet about working with them more. It worked out well, I did over 60 arrangements, and now my string quartet arrangements have over 2 million views on YouTube.I finally realized: when we go out of our comfort zone and create opportunities, good things happen. Bad things when we stay in our comfort zone. The secret in other words is—THE NEXT SECRET, #3When you don’t have luck on your side, you have to make your own luck.FINALLY, BOOKS ON EACH OF THE THREE SECRETSRemember how at the beginning, we were talking about how becoming a dentist is not like being a composer? Well don’t you wish there was a book that explained that difference? A book that helped you understand why some musicians are rockstars and others can barely get a gig?There is a book and it is called….THE BLACK SWAN — NICHOLAS NASSIM TALEBThis book will challenge the things that your parents have taught you and that you learned in school.If you don’t read this book, you risk being beaten by people who have better concepts in their mind for thinking about the music business and business in general.Now at the beginning I promised that even though you have to slog it out in a composition career, your outlook is not dismal. (As many competing composers want you to believe.) Your outlook is very good indeed. That’s because there’s power in the most unlikely place—THE POWER OF BROKE — DAYMOND JOHNThere’s power in being broke. Power in being obscure.Don’t know how these could be advantages? Don’t know how to leverage these assets? Read this book.What’s your unique value to the world? What do you have that people find valuable?Unless you know the answer to these questions, you won’t be able to make it in any business, much less music composition.But what if I told you that someone spent the time and money to have scientists create a test that tells you? Tells you what people value in you? But more importantly…tells you the one thing that will suck the life and energy out of you?Could this be the thing that puts you on the right path, ultimately saving years of your life??Save yourself heartache and pain and just take the free, 5-minute quiz:howtofascinate.comIf this test had been available to me sooner, I would have saved about 8 years pursuing the wrong things for me.HOW THE WORLD SEES YOU—SALLY HOGSHEADThis companion book helps you understand the ideas, and is most likely available for free at your library.So let’s fast forward a couple weeks: After you read these books and take copious notes, you understand a couple things: you know how a business area like composition works. You realize that your personal situation is your greatest asset, and you know what value you can add to the world.But still how do you get started?Is there a book that gives you the tools to understand the music industry, understand your competitors, and what mistakes to avoid?All this from someone who has made tons of money selling books (almost as in demand as music), who was a marketing director at a major company, and who has interviewed the best entrepreneurs of all time— (And BTW, he gives you this book for free.)THE BOOTSTRAPPER’S BIBLE—SETH GODINBy reading these books, by taking notes, and applying the information, you are applying secret #3: When you don’t have luck on your side, you have to make your own luck. You are giving yourself advantages over other composers who say, “Well, IDK about that business stuff.”Do you think that Hans Zimmer ever thought like that? How about Danny Elfman? Or Michael Giacchino?And maybe you’ve figured this out for yourself by now… some of the most successful composers out there are businessmen FIRST, and composers SECOND.In an area with fierce competition and high quality from top schools, you make money based on being in the right place at the right time, making your own luck, seeing opportunity and offering value.Composition—well you should be competent, but how good do you really need to be in order to make it?Just last year, I had the opportunity to work for video games music assisting the composer… and you know what? The composer had only been writing for a couple years. “A COUPLE YEARS?!?” I thought. “I’VE BEEN WRITING FOR TWENTY, AND I HAVEN’T HAD THAT OPPORTUNITY.” But he was a production manager, he had been doing production a long time, so when he wants to do composition, he tells everyone that he’s doing it. Then does it.So that leads us to the fourth and final secret, that no one is telling you.50 REASONS WHY LEARNING THE NITTY GRITTY MIGHT NOT BE AS VALUABLE AS YOU THINKYou know how much there is to learn on composition? Do you know what some people have done to learn the craft?Read this list and you tell me if it seems over-complicated: (Read like an auctioneer to get the full effect.)Classical/Baroque: sonata form, song form, motives, basic ideas, harmonic voice leading, polyphony, fugue, pentatonic scales, secondary dominants, ostinato, doppio movimento, passacaglia, theme and variation, dissonance and consonance, Schenkerian analysis, modulation, relative minor, parallel minor, relative major of the parallel minor, parallel major of the dominant in minor (Beethoven was fond of that one, he was.), pivot chords, color chords, avoidance of parallel octaves and parallel fifths, horn fifths, cross relation, harmonic rhythm, chord substitution, portamenti, voice leading, liquidation, masculine and feminine endings, sturm und drang, mordents, trills, cadence, plagal cadence, deceptive cadence, pedal tones, music notation, music engraving, dynamics, sforzando, minuetto, scherzo.Orchestration/Instrumentation: timbre, balance, interlocking/overlapping/enclosed chordal voicing, tessitura, articulation, portato, marcato, down bow, up bow, double stops, string ranges, divisi, unisoni, bridge, frog, artificial & natural harmonics, pizzicato, arco, tremolo, fingered tremolo, left-hand pizzicato, guitarra, punta d’arco, white tone, woodwind ranges, frullato, legato tonguing, double tonguing, triple tonguing, instrument transposition, transposed score, concert score, drum tuning, conical bore, cylindrical bore, slides, harmon mute, cup mute, straight mute, bucket mute, plunger mute, inserts, entrance cues, alternative cues, col, repeat notation, score order. (And this doesn’t even include the names of the instruments).Atonal/less tonal: pitch class sets (hundreds of these), retrograde, inversion, retrograde-inversion, prime form, polychords, planing, clusters, chromatic harmony, quartal harmonies, bartok pizzicato, senza vibrato, sul ponticello, glissandi, octatonic scales, aleatoric notation, minimalism, embedded tuplets, cells, rows, Viennese triad, mystic chord, tone colors.Jazz: Modal jazz, Jazz arrangement, swing feel, syncopation, heads, improv, grips, tritone chord substitutions, complex 9th, 11th and 13th chords, flatted 5 chords, sharp 5 chords, enharmonic spelling, obligato, rips, spills, doits, riffs, drum kit notation, improv notation, patterns, and bends.Phew.END LISTIf you aren’t careful with how you approach it, you might learn all that stuff and only use about 2% of that on an actual, paid job. Do you know how frustrated you might feel?Don’t be the boob like me who learns all that stuff, then gets beat out by a guy who during his day job, learns writes music in Apple’s Garage Band using apple loops—then beats me to a job.In a matter of fact, learning all this might actually make your music worse—from the audience’s or client’s point of view.Wouldn’t be great to learn the most used, top secrets, in the shortest amount of time? And to focus on the specific compositional techniques loved by audiences? To save time by avoiding the techniques that make the audience frown at your music? What if there was a program that could get you up and running to a moderate level in only a month or two? Well……the only problem is—No book like that exists.I know I really wish I had something like that when I was starting out. If you are interested and want a book like that, comment below or PM.I’ve shown you what a rough road it can be. But if music is something you need to do, if reading about these challenges only gets you invigorated, then keep reading, because I’ll reveal the best ways to get started. First, if you are interested in the freelancing route. Second, if you are interested in getting a job teaching at a university.HOW TO GET STARTED WITH MUSIC COMPOSITIONWARNING: If you want a job at a university, don’t even look at this list. It. Will. Mess. You. Up.Remember how at the beginning of the article, we talked about how many careers are created by luck? In a little bit I will reveal to you the secret of creating your own luck.I will also reveal how to not only create a career in music, but also show you how to avoid losing that career.I am going to give you a list of things to do. A long list.If I saw this list when I was starting, I might be thinking…”but shouldn’t I learn more first before I get out there?”Here’s the thing.You don’t need any incubation period. You are not an egg. You are not a chickpea. You don’t need to “cultivate your artistic self-expression.”You need to get clients now so you can start learning what people like and what they hate. Otherwise there’s a chance you’ll get a habit of inaction, or you’ll get scared of showing your music, and then twenty years go by, and you’re still in your parent’s basement.SECRET #4: START NOW AND GET CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK FROM THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BE HIRING YOU.The ListGet a good sequencer. Doesn’t have to be complicated. Garage Band is fine.Make a chord progression using this simple chord progression maker:Sing with your chord progression! Your voice is the best for making melodies.Don’t like your singing? Get a vocal teacher. Tell them why you are taking lessons and see what ideas they have to help. If they don’t make sense or seem helpful, then find someone else quickly. Odds are you’ll have to go through a few teachers.Get a piano teacher to improve your piano-playing skills.Like the singing above, tell them your objective is not to learn Bach or Mozart, but to get your synth skills up to par. As above, don’t settle.Do you know someone who’s a composer? Figure out if they’re a good pianist. You might just learn some composing tricks along the way.Start writing music for people you know to get your feet wet. (But of course, since you read the boots trappers guide, you’ll always have a plan about how to give value to client and earn money.)Find other people to collaborate with. Build a referral system. Using ideas from the bootstrappers guide think about other ways to make money.Didn’t make money doing that last thing? That’s OK. It happens. Try something else. Keep adding value to your services—don’t just add on any old thing.Repeat the list until you find what you’re best at and where you can make the most money. Never stay stagnant. If you do, you’ll lose in what’s called the innovator’s dilemma.If you still really need a book on composition.If you still want a book on composition, try this one:Composing Music: A New Approach—William RussoStill, I don’t 100% recommend this book, because it’s a bit dated. Every student I’ve used this with got discouraged and left my studio soon after. Their general feeling about this book was: “What’s the point?”However, it’s still a good book because you get introduced to certain concepts in a step-by-step manner. Book is better for teaching jazz-ish composition, because Russo was a jazz arranger. Also, some exercises just sound quirky.10 Composition Books That Will Waste Your Time, and WhyIf you are going to be going into freelance work, these books really won’t give you any significant benefit.Fundamentals of Musical Composition—Arnold Schoenberg Why: Even though he was an atonal composer, Schoenberg was THE best at teaching tonal composition. The problem if you’ll be freelancing: you’ll sound like Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, or Brahms and clients don’t want that. Problem if you’ll be at a university: Depending upon the professor he may or may not like the method. However, they will tell you how to write. So they want you to be an empty slate.Twentieth-Century Harmony—Vincent Persichetti Why: The ideas are not going to be liked by your clients or audience, unless you write for horror or sci-fi.Analyzing Classical Form—William E. Caplin Don’t get me wrong. I love Caplin’s work. I even sent him a limited edition music engraving of Mozart’s Voi Che Sapete. And I used the principles in this book to write my first symphony. However, like the Schoenberg book above, you’ll sound like Beethoven and Mozart. And the ideas are complex and not the best for beginners. This book is a better resource for classical performers.The Study of Counterpoint from Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum—Alfred Mann. Same reason as above, but you’ll sound even older. Except: If you are interested in writing serious choral music, this might give you some good tools and patterns.Behind Bars—Elaine Gould Why: This is the best book on music notation, but as a budding composer it gives you the wrong emphasis. You can only become successful if you’re thinking about your client and audience and reaching them. You don’t want to start thinking about how notes are supposed to look on the page. This book is a Red Herring—one that I followed.The Study of Orchestration—Samuel Adler Why: This is the most comprehensive book on orchestration currently available. I studied this. You do not want to start with this. Orchestration is a more advanced topic. Also, if you want to be a top composer, you have to start thinking like a top composer. Does Hans Zimmer do his own orchestration? No. Does Danny Elfman do his own orchestration? No. Does Michael Giacchino do his own orchestration? No. Does even JOHN Frickin WILLIAMS do his own orchestration? No. They focused instead on building a stellar team of A players.Principles of Orchestration—Nikolai-Rimsky Korsakov Why: I love, love, love this book, but it’s not updated and same problem as Adler’s book.Musical Composition—Alan Belkin Why: I’ve really disagreed with Alan’s methods. It focuses on the details (such as inner voices) instead of the bigger aspects of composition—the emotion and motion of the piece. While inner voices are important to make a piece sound alive, you don’t want to start thinking about a bunch of details as you’re starting to learn.What You Can Do Right Now To Improve Your MusicYou did the right thing by getting on this Quora page. You’re doing the right thing by look for the answers on Quora. So what can you do now?First, if you’re a beginner and want to learn faster, PM me or put a comment below. Please include your answers to these questions about yourself, since they’ll help me understand you better: What’s your favorite piece? What’s your dream? How many years/months have you been composing?Then, we’ll make a plan how to better achieve your dream, or you’ll be referred to someone else.Second, follow me here, on Quora.BONUS SECTION—BECOMING AN ACADEMICNOTE: If you are not interested in going the traditional route and teaching music for a career, skip this section.Still interested in pursuing an academic career? Here’s what you do if you are in Junior High or High School.Become awesome at your instrument. Get a good piano/flute/violin teacher whose students have been accepted to good colleges.Learn to name intervals by ear. Both simultaneous (harmonic) and melodic. Get a good vocal trainer to teach you. Here’s a training exercise: http://www.teoria.com/en/exercises/ie.php See how you score.Forget about composition until sophomore year. You don’t have to be a great composer to get into a good program. You do have to be a good instrumentalist and have a good ear.Find a collegiate composition professor that you truly like. (Don’t fake it. You will be miserable. I promise. I studied with a composition professor I didn’t like.)Contact a student of the professor, and ask to get tips of how you study with him. His students not doing well? You might want to rethink your decision.Find 2nd 3rd 4th composition professor choices if that doesn’t work out.Study carefully the college’s guidelines for application.Find a composer who can teach you what you need to do to get accepted. (Maybe one of the previous students?)Brush up on music notation skills or hire a professional music engraver to fix up your music.This next tip, I can’t emphasize enough. While for other degrees the school is important—FOR MUSIC COMPOSITION IT’S ALL ABOUT WHO YOU STUDY WITH.I know it’s not pleasant, but think of yourself like a show dog, a pure bread German Shepherd. Winning the show is all about pedigree. Your pedigree has to be pristine if you want a chance to teach at a university instead of a two or four year college. You need Masters and Doctorate from respected teachers, but that still doesn’t guarantee career placement.______If you use a quote from this, please be a decent human being and link back to me at davidimusic.com. Grazie.______FYI: This comes from a related Quora post, and I will leave it here until the posts get combined.What next?If you are interested in becoming a composer check out this answer next to understand how it REALLY works for most composers.

Let me tell you my story. You should be able to find the answers to most of your questions about your life. Think about it.From: John 16: 12-13: The teachings of Jesus Christ clarified and made plainJourney to LightA New Age Fast ApproachesLife Without LightThe CenterTruth Can Be FoundWhat’s It All AboutThe Path Ahead"Great changes are coming! This Center will be the Center of centers in this part of the world. Many will come to you. Everyone should make ready to receive them." This is the essence of repeated prophetic communications given by Archangel Michael, the Spirit Protector of the Centro Sermon dela Montaña (Center Sermon on the Mount) and other elevated Spirits.Life without LightIt was June 1976. Getting older and getting nowhere, I looked back at the past. During my early years, I was blessed. Born to a middle class family, a lawyer father and educator mother, we weren’t rich, but I was enrolled in the leading public schools which were the best in the country, owing to the American influence. Besides always being near the top of my class, I had practically everything I needed or wanted. Everything came easily.I was always in a hurry and was very materialistic in my outlook. I wanted to become a millionaire in my early twenties and retire at thirty. Fresh out of college with borrowed capital, I engaged in business, publishing books. From my first year earnings, I was able to buy a brand new car. After another two years, for ethical reasons, I left publishing, altogether, even though the money was still better than good. Then I began to trade in the stock market. In just about two years of trading, I made 40 times my small starting capital after deducting all my personal expenses during the same period.While my classmates were struggling just to get by, I already had my car, complete with my own personal driver and was actually shopping to buy a house. I wined and dined in the best exclusive nightclubs and casinos. Young, confident and successful, without a care, I immersed myself in all the good things life could offer.Then, suddenly out of nowhere in 1971, with the stock market crash just before the imminent declaration of Martial Law, it happened to me the way fortunes turn in every life — almost overnight, I lost everything.I became so desperate; I even turned to fortunetellers for direction and guidance, which never was my practice before. Three of them in succession told me basically the same things and confirmed my worst fears. More hardships for the rest of my long life and I was just 26 years old. I had quite a ways to go. During one of the readings, I remember that in my panic, I trembled so uncontrollably. The table my arms rested on shook violently as it would in a prolonged earthquake. Those who were with me originally for the entertainment got a little scared, as well. I sat paralyzed except for the shaking, shell-shocked like a soldier in the thick of battle as I heard my future read.During the next five years, I lived on charity and only barely managed to get by. Much of the time, I was almost totally immobilized by fear for every move I made seemed to spell disaster. And everything I tried failed. Where before, it came so easily, now it came not at all.All that time, I could think of nothing but that I was a hopeless good-for-nothing and a total failure. Not being able to provide even for the basic needs of my family, I had failed my sacred duty toward God. Many times during that low period in my life, I even contemplated suicide. Since I was a burden to the family, at least, in death, I thought perhaps, my family would benefit more. But somehow, with a lot of help and encouragement from my wife, parents and close friends, I managed to pull myself together to survive.Finally, tired and destitute, in debt and in despair, with a growing family to feed at that, I was hopelessly lost, confused and seeking for answers. Why, God? Why me? So many who don’t deserve it get all the blessings, why not me? What have I done? Where is God’s love and generosity? Where is God’s justice and fairness? Much of the time, I spent brooding, complaining and questioning, but the answers would not come. The prospects were nil. The future, bleak and gloomy. In times of plenty, I didn't give a thought about God, so now, I felt, God forgot about me. And I was filled with so much doubt and apprehension.The CenterThere had been some publicity or notoriety concerning faith healing and psychic phenomena that excited my curiosity. One afternoon, along with two friends, I attended a Sunday afternoon session of the Centro Sermon dela Montaña. It was the first time I witnessed what many called a seance. At the time, I thought seances were only held in darkness. I was wrong. And because I had some fear of the unknown and so many questions, I began to interview the members to resolve my confusion.I learned that the Center was open to everyone who desired to develop himself, spiritually. It was actually a place for learning. There were no enforced dues but everything was on a purely voluntary basis. As a come-on to newcomers, most times, membership to an organization and the use of its facilities are usually free, but only at first. Later, after you get drawn in, you find that it always costs you a fortune to continue. I was a wise guy even then and was always on the lookout for small print and hidden strings. Having been in business since way back, I have always been cynical about many things, but always glad whenever I am proven to be wrong.The discussions were very democratic. We could even reject any and all of the communications and teachings. I had always thought, according to the movies, that Spirits were very forceful and compelling. But not the genuine Spirits of Truth, we were corrected by the members. And once a member, we could join the training for the development of our psychic abilities, again, free of charge. This was a very good deal — One I couldn't refuse. Even at that time, psychic development courses cost a bundle elsewhere, something I could no longer afford.Still, I continued to be very cautious and apprehensive. The Espiritistas, as they called themselves, were considered by many to be weirdos and fanatics. I thought so, too. Many of the members being ignorant and unschooled, the old superstitious practices were prevalent and much of what they did made no sense to me. I had my objections, serious ones at that. But because it was free except for the customary Sunday service voluntary donations, I was under no obligation and for plain curiosity's sake, I just played along, observing and trying to learn all I could. Something was making me stay and I didn't know what it was.Truth Can Be FoundMy third meeting with the group turned out to be quite a surprise. It was a training session and I was just an observer, not yet a member. The Sunday services and healing sessions were for the benefit of the general public. The training on the other hand was exclusively for members only, for their own personal development. But we were invited.The training session was to run for three or four hours extending up to past midnight. The activities included among others: meditation, or tuning in to the Divine, evangelization with emphasis on Biblical teachings, clairvoyance, or seeing non-physical objects and Spirits, automatic writing and trance mediumship to obtain a direct communication with the Guides, astral traveling, and healing arts, including the blessing of oil and water.During automatic writing, a young medium named Zeny who was with the Forestry Department received a message addressed to me, personally. It said, "Joe, don’t let little things deter you in your search for Truth." It was signed "Ozuario," supposedly a Spaniard in the Philippines during the four hundred year Spanish Occupation of our country. Needless to say, the message occupied my thoughts for days.At that time, I found Catholic and Protestant teachings to be illogical and unreasonable. I had just completed a "Cursillo," a mini course on Catholic catechism. My heart was very touched by the obvious deep devotion of "The Little Shepherds" but the ineffectual answers given to me there were not satisfying and I remained unconvinced. The explanations relied too much on blind faith while ignoring more practical considerations based on common sense and human reasoning culled from direct personal experiences. Possibly, this is why a Spirit entity who was not a known Christian advocate gave me my first message.I was not consciously searching for Truth, nor did I realize that there was a Truth, to begin with. But then, wasn't I searching for answers? And were I not enjoined to continue, I might easily have desisted, especially in the face of "little things" which seemed to me insurmountable conflicts and inconsistencies. But apparently, the Spirits seemed to know me. And so, because of that seemingly innocent message, which to me was full of meaning and depth, I was fired up and I kept on.My interest having been captured so masterfully and since training in the Center was scheduled for only once a month; I looked for other similar groups which trained more frequently. I found one presided over by a University of the Philippines English professor and member of Phi Kappa Phi at her home inside the campus. Meny was also an accomplished trance medium and telepath. But unlike many other mediums, she was highly educated. She had an excellent grasp of the Higher Teachings, comprehended them well and was able to explain the more elevated concepts and ideas more effectively, far better than most.Archangel Michael must really know me well because the early messages were: "There is only One God. All religions are one. All Paths lead home." My silent questions were all being answered one by one, as if he could read my mind. "Accept only what is suitable, reject what is not apt. God is just. Everything has a reason. You (referring to me) have been guided here." And a personal shocker — the Archangel also told me that they were the ones who actually took away all my pretensions of worldly success, my entire livelihood and all my money from me. And what a job they did to me. "God gives and He takes away."In a subsequent session, St. Paul, through a different medium asked me if I had a question to ask him. There were just too many of them that I didn't know where to begin so I begged off. I told him, "It's just that I don’t understand."He replied, "Even though you don’t understand now, just continue with your studies. Life really is hard. Keep your thoughts pure and make yourself ready. Do you understand?" he asked me. I said yes and thanked him for his advice.At that time, my money problems were compounding and weighing me down, and there was no relief in sight. Besides, I was an active young man like any other and I had many worldly inclinations which some would consider to be faults. So I understood that these character flaws and worldly desires required my special attention and correction. In the meantime, I continued with my outside reading during the lag time. I was appreciative of the guidance given to me. But the actual extent of their guidance was much more than I thought then.In another session, St. Peter, through another medium, approached us all one by one. Turning to me, he said, "We have been closely monitoring your progress from the Spirit World. Open your heart and strive to realize what we have been trying all this time to help you realize." Then St. Peter blessed me. I felt the warmth of his love and powerful waves of energy enveloped my whole body and filtered through to the very core of my being. The feeling lasted for quite a long while and I stood in awe, for this was the first physical evidence of their undeniable presence that I was able to directly perceive.From time to time, it was the custom for members of different Spiritist centers affiliated with the Union Espiritista Cristiana de Filipinas, Incorporada to come and visit other centers as exchange students or in the fulfillment of a mission. The visiting students are usually given an opportunity to participate in the proceedings.During one of our study sessions, a visiting medium and elder from the Union Headquarters who didn't know me, nor I her, received the Spirit of John the Baptist who true to his name and calling then asked those present if they would like to be baptized. At that time, I was predisposed enough to accept his invitation.When it was my turn, John the Baptist addressed me as "orador" (orator). Previous to this episode, there were other instances when hints were given to me concerning my supposed past lives. His pronouncement only served to subtly confirm to me that reincarnation is a basic teaching, even if, at the time, speaking in public was not easy for me, even up to now, and I usually keep my peace unless I really have something important to say.Two months after I began these studies, as healing was a special feature of our training program, I submitted myself to a check-up. The Spirit who later identified himself as Dr. Jose Rizal, our national hero and "Manu"-in-charge of the Filipino race, who, in addition to his many superlative talents, was also an eye surgeon in that life examined my eyes through yet another medium. He asked me if I sometimes experienced dizzy spells. I told him, "Yes."Then he asked me if I was willing to have some of my blood drained. He said my blood was thick and heavy, that draining it should help remedy the condition. Again, I said, "Yes, please." At the point where the invisible syringe penetrated my skin, I felt something like an ant bite. Then I felt my blood being drained from my body. On my other arm, I felt the same sensation. Although I could not actually see the syringe, a number of the clairvoyant members actually did see it. And these things were for me becoming easier and easier to accept. The Unseen World is the Real World was an oft repeated message.Then he proceeded to do something in the vicinity of my forehead, as if inserting something inside. My eyes were closed but in my mind’s eye, I saw a miniature bolt of lightning enter me. When he was through, Dr. Rizal asked me if I knew what he just did. I didn’t and I told him so, respectfully. I was still a little afraid of Spirits even then. There was still a lot that I could not understand, but I felt comfortable enough to trust them. He told me he gave me a spark of the Light. Then he continued, "May you now be able to receive the inspirations we have been trying to send you." I thanked the Doctor for his help.I did not have long to wait. For it is written, "The Truth will always be revealed."Three days later on August 9, 1976, I was composing a letter of protest against the inconsistencies I had observed in the Center. I felt strongly that certain practices tended to confuse rather than clarify the basic teachings. It was in trying to help others, that I helped myself. Arranging my arguments to support my contentions, all the bits and pieces of information I had been storing in the back of my consciousness fell into place. And for the first time, I understood. And I had the answers I needed. All the mystery was gone and everything was clear.What’s It All AboutI became fully aware that God is alive and cares for us all. Even in the worst of times, He has been providing for the precise needs of all His children, only I didn’t understand how, until then.Who are we, really? What are we doing here on this planet? What is the meaning of life and what is its purpose? Why are there conditions of war, famine, hunger and poverty? Why is nature allowed to wreak havoc on Earth? Why is there injustice, tyranny and oppression? How can God be said to be just when these circumstances persist?Why are there so many religions, and yet, all are one? What do the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of all faiths actually mean? What happens after death, for evidently, spirit survives? Who are the Spirits of Truth? How can psychic abilities be normal and natural to everyone?Jesus Christ stated emphatically, he is not of this world? What world is he speaking of? Why do we need to love everyone as we love ourselves? How do we receive by giving? What does it mean, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all things will be added on to you?" Are these statements true?To these questions and all others, the answers are being made available through the inspired messages and divine guidance of the Spirits of Truth. Had Jesus Christ not said he would send the Holy Spirit to tell us of the future and guide us to All Truth? I write today merely to attest to the fulfillment of that promise.The Path AheadEveryone has the right to be happy and be free from fear, doubt and ignorance. Everyone can begin to understand if he gives himself the chance. And if he seeks for the Truth, he will find it. This, too, has been promised.As for me, I had my answers. But I realized that the really hard work still lay ahead. Knowledge is nothing without works, just as faith without works is dead. Everyone will be judged according to his deeds. Deeds are what count.But don’t get me wrong. My life remains difficult with tremendous pressures to bear. I wasn’t the millionaire that I set out to be. In fact, I owed everybody to the tune of a few hundred thousand 1971 pesos and counting. Somehow, though, I was no longer as complaining as before, no longer as troubled, even at peace and willing to wait patiently and endure. The knowledge of the Truth made all the difference.Settling down, I determined to buckle down to the real work ahead of me. After all, I owe it to God and to myself to prepare for my eternal future in the Greater Life Beyond. Heaven is beckoning to all. The Golden Age is upon us. The Age of Aquarius is knocking at the door.