Dear Sir,
I have just received the very valuable packet of Talbotypes <1> which you have been so kind as to send me, and for which I thank you most heartily. I do not believe that a Child ever received a Toy with more pleasure than I do a Sun-Picture. It is a sort of monomania which my dealings with light have inflicted upon me.
I saw the Aurora of the 24 very favourably, & examined the bright purple light of the most westerly beams both with a polariscope and a Prism. I could not trace the least appearance of Polarisation in it; nor could I perceive any bands or lines in the purple light, which I refracted into a dark recess among our Monastery Ruins, <2> and made the angle of Incidence a maximum to supply the want of a narrow aperture whh if used wd not have admitted light enough for decomposition.
I am not engaged at present in any very specific inquiry. You will see in the next No of the Phil. Magazine, the result of a very laborious investigation of the law of Atmospheric polarisation <3> which I think you will consider satisfactory.
I shall be very glad to circulate, usefully, your Reply to the Quarterly. <4> There are some writers in that Journal who are very dishonest persons. I had occasion to attend particularly to a most dishonest review of Dr Keiths’ Work on Prophecy,<5> in which that excellent man was charged with the vilest plagiarism, & the charges supported by false and tricky citations. My elder Brother the late Dr Brewster of Craig, <6> as Dr Keith’s friend wrote an elaborate pamphlet in reply to the Review, which completely demolished it, and yet in subsequently noticing the pamphlet they had recourse to the same tricks & falsehoods which they had employed agst Dr Keith. You will probably share the same fate. I suspected that the assailant of Dr Keith was a clergyman, whom I personally know, but I believe yt in Reviews of the “slashing” order, two or three individuals club their malevolence.
I shall read with much pleasure your English Etymologies, and have to have to [sic] thank you for the Copy of it which I shall receive soon. I have put it down in the list of Books for our Library, and shall endeavour to get a Notice of it into the North British Review.<7>
I am, Dear Sir, Ever Most Truly yrs
D Brewster
St Leonards’ College
St Andrews
Novr 13th 1847
Henry Fox Talbot Esqr
&c &c &c
Notes:
1. Brewster and some other friends and supporters of WHFT wished to have the inventor's name be used for the Calotype proces.
2. The buildings of the former St Leonard’s College are very close to part of the wall of the old priory and its gateways known as the Pends [photographed by Hill and Adamson. See Sara Stevenson, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981), p.204.]
3. David Brewster, ‘On the Polarisation of the Atmosphere’, Philosophical Magazine, s. 3 v. 31 no. 201, pp.444–454.
4. See Doc. No: 06078. This was WHFT’s response to the hostile review of his WHFT, English Etymologies (London: J. Murray, 1847) by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review, v. 81, September 1847, pp.500–525. John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), Irish-born, was a Tory MP from 1807 to 1832 and Secretary of the Admiralty from 1810 to 1830. As an author, he was noted for his virulent reviews in The Quarterly Review as much as for his 1831 edition of Boswell's Live of Johnson.
5. Alexander Keith (1791–1880), founder member of the Free Church of Scotland, pioneering daguerreotypist and writer on prophecy. For a portrait, see Sara Stevenson, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981), p.76. For the controversy surrounding Keith’s work on prophecy, see note 12 in Schaaf, Sun Pictures Catalogue 6: Dr Thomas Keith and John Forbes White (New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr. Inc., 1993).
6. The Revd James Brewster (1777–1847). For a portrait, see Sara Stevenson, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1981), p.44.
7. At the time, a journal of the Free Church.