Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet

The other event which gives a little color to this period is the effort made by Hume to secure the appointment to the Chair of Ethics and Pneumatic Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.

The occupant of the chair, Dr., afterwards Sir John Pringle Had been appointed physician to the Earl of Stair, commander of the British forces in the Low Countries, and in accordance with the loose practice of these times, had been for two years absent from his duties in the university.

The Council of Edinburgh, to which he offered his resignation, thought it necessary that at least a term be put to his further absence, and in March 1745 he actually did resign.

When the vacancy was in prospect, Hume was induced to put himself forward as a candidate, August 1744, and backed by the provost's influence, thought himself secure of the appointment.

Banks were communicated by him at different times in papers to the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow as early as the year seventeen sixty-six.

On the resignation of Sir John Pringle in seventeen seventy-eight, Mr.

Banks was elected president of this society, an honor he continued to hold until his death.

During the whole of his life, Sir Joseph enjoyed the favor of the king, forming a kind of connecting link between his scientific peers and the courtly circles of the aristocracy.

In the last year at the Black Assizes in the Old Bailey died four of the six members of the judges' bank, the Lord Mayor, two judges and an alderman, besides a large proportion of the officers of the law.

Sir John Pringle, the recorder of this tragic reminiscence, accompanied the English army in 1742 and 43 to Germany, afterwards to Flanders and Brabant, as physician-general, and there first became acquainted with war typhus under the face of hospital fever.

He was the first to detect and prove the identity of jail with hospital fever and to trace both to noxious effluvia corrupting the air.

Since Hildebrand in his celebrated work on contagious typhus went over to his view and clearly stated that an excess of human effluvia is alone the source of all typhus matter, it has become general, especially for spotted fever, which is for the most part presumed to originate in this manner.