Robert Chambers

In December 1723, the body of a newborn boy was found by the later accounts on the bank of the River Tweed near Kelso, and it was laid to her.

Robert Chambers, who collected the case in his Domestic Annals of Scotland in 1861, says that a defense was made for her that she was a married woman, though living separate from her husband, but it was of no avail.

On Monday, August 3rd, 1724, she was sentenced to die in the grass market the first Wednesday of September.

In its notice of the sentence, the Mercury got her first name wrong and called her Janet.

Uh, he wrote a very sharp review of a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which had been published anonymously by, uh, a man called-

...

Chambers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert Chambers in 1844.

Um, he, he was not alone, actually, in his response to Chambers [laughs] 'cause-

[laughs] No, everybody was

He thought that all planets were probably inhabited because that was actually a pretty common belief throughout the Enlightenment that Why would God create a planet if it wasn't going to be inhabited by some form of life? Why waste that space? And so, yeah, Herschel was pretty convinced that even stars might have some forms of life on them.

The man Robert Chambers.

That takes me to places where I've never been.

Robert Chambers, he calls a modern Dante, died 1871.

He writes a book called Vestiges, which appears, from your telling, I've not read the book or seen it even in physical form, to be a projection of the world he lives in on the heavens.

Is that how to read this? Almost as if a dystopian romance.

Cotter's Saturday Night It's hardly in a body's power to keep at times frae being sour, to see how things are shared, how best the chiels are whiles in want, while coofs on countless thousands rant, and ken na how to wear it.

Missile to Davy Biographical Preface Dr. Currie, in his Life and Works of Robert Burns, published 12th of April 1800, for the benefit of the poet's widow and children, writes, quote, The father of our poet is described by one who knew him towards the latter end of his life as above the common stature, thin and bent down with labour.

His countenance was serious and expressive, and the scanty locks on his head were grey.

He was of a religious turn of mind, and, as is usual among the Scottish peasantry, a good deal conversant in speculative theology.

With Mr. Murdoch, we learned to read English tolerably well and to write a little.

He taught us too the English grammar.

I was too young to profit much from his lessons in grammar, but Robert made some proficiency.

My father took the farm at Mount Oliphant and removed at Whitsuntide seventeen sixty-six.

He was not quite three feet and a half high, since he could stand upright in the door of his mansion, which was just that height.

The following particulars concerning his figure and temper occur in the Scots Magazine for 1817 and are now understood to have been communicated by the ingenious Mr. Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, who has recorded with much spirit the traditions of the good town and in other publications largely and agreeably added to the stock of our popular antiquities.

He is the countryman of David Ritchie and had the best access to collect anecdotes of him.

His skull, says this authority, which was of an oblong and rather unusual shape, was said to be of such strength that he could strike it with ease through the panel of a door or the end of a barrel.

The question with its author, however, was how, when it was finished, he was to get it published.

I took it to my friend Robert Chambers, and asked for his opinion about it.

He looked at the manuscript, which was certainly not in such good handwriting as his own, and observed slyly- "Would you mind just reading a bit of it?" I had never done such a thing before, nor have I since, and the proposal was a little staggering, not to my amour propre, but to my natural modesty.

Moreover, I mistrusted my ability to do justice to it, remembering what the poet has said about reading one's own productions.

Somebody wrote to complain that he had written, not published, a story upon the same lines and even incidents as The Family Scapegrace just before its appearance in the columns of Chambers Journal, and the delicate inference he drew was that, whether in my capacity of editor or otherwise, I must have somehow got hold of it.

He gave the exact date of the conclusion of his own composition, which was prior to the commencement of my story in the Journal.

Conscious of innocence, but troubled by so disagreeable an imputation, I laid the matter before Robert Chambers.

You are not so versed in the ways of this class of person as I am, he said, smiling.

Exactly.

He's likely referencing ideas that were popularized by works like Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which was widely read in the 1840s and 50s.

Spurgeon mocks the idea that floating atoms somehow organized themselves into monads.

A monad being like a philosophical or early biological term for a single-celled indivisible organism.