of
idle ease. Industry had become his habit, and active occupation was
necessary to his happiness. He fell back upon the cultivation of those
artistic tastes which are the heritage of his family. When a boy at
the High School of Edinburgh, he was so skilful in making pen and ink
illustrations on the margins of the classics, that he thus often
purchased from his monitors exemption from the lessons of the day. Nor
had he ceased to cultivate the art during his residence at Patricroft,
but was accustomed to fall back upon it for relaxation and enjoyment
amid the pursuits of trade. That he possesses remarkable fertility of
imagination, and great skill in architectural and landscape drawing, as
well as in the much more difficult art of delineating the human figure,
will be obvious to any one who has seen his works,--more particularly
his "City of St. Ann's," "The Fairies," and "Everybody for ever!"
which last was exhibited in Pall Mail, among the recent collection of
works of Art by amateurs and others, for relief of the Lancashire
distress. He has also brought his common sense to bear on such
unlikely subject's as the origin of the cuneiform character. The
possession of a brick from Babylon set him a thinking. How had it been
manufactured? Its under side was clearly marked by the sedges of the
Euphrates upon which it had been laid to dry and bake in the sun. But
how about those curious cuneiform characters? How had writing assumed
so remarkable a form? His surmise was this: that the brickmakers, in
telling their tale of bricks, used the triangular corner of another
brick, and by pressing it down upon the soft clay, left behind it the
triangular mark which the cuneiform character exhibits. Such marks
repeated, and placed in different relations to each other, would
readily represent any number. From the use of the corner of a brick in
writing, the transition was easy to a pointed stick with a triangular
end, by the use of which all the cuneiform characters can readily be
produced upon the soft clay. This curious question formed the subject
of an interesting paper read by Mr. Nasmyth before the British
Association at Cheltenham.

But the most engrossing of Mr. Nasmyth's later pursuits has been the
science of astronomy, in which, by bringing a fresh, original mind to
the observation of celestial phenomena, he has succeeded in making some
of the most remarkable discoveries of our time. Astronomy was one of
his fa