Map of a Nation Read Online Free PDF

delivered by the Edinburgh mathematician Colin Maclaurin. A child prodigy who was elected Professor of Mathematics at Aberdeen University at the age of nineteen , Maclaurin had so impressed Isaac Newton with his work that Newton had even offered to pay his salary. At Edinburgh, Maclaurin devised a rigorous course of mathematical education that emphasised the discipline’s practical applications, especially to map-making. The Scots Magazine described how, in his lectures, Maclaurin ‘begins with demonstrating the grounds of vulgar and decimal arithmetic; then proceeds to Euclid; and after … insists on surveying, fortification and other practical parts’. Maclaurin’s lecture-theatre was an intellectual hothouse that produced a brood of illustrious surveyors, architects and mathematical instrument-makers such as Alexander Bryce, Murdoch Mackenzie, Robert Adam and James Short. Sitting in Maclaurin’s audience, the Dundases, and perhaps Watson too, were among inspiring cartographical company.
    As David Watson approached his mid teens, his sister and her husband applied themselves to furthering his career. Characteristically of younger relatives of the gentry, Watson expressed an interest in joining the Army. Robert Dundas used his influence to obtain a commission for his younger brother-in-law, and Watson duly spent much of his twenties and thirties on the Continent. He endured a ‘long banishment at Gib[raltar]’, where the British were building fortifications, and he enjoyed a martial ‘Scuffle’ during the War of the Polish Succession. But while Watson was fighting abroad, tragedy struck at Arniston. In November 1733 Elizabeth and Robert’s youngson came home from the local school in Dalkeith with signs of sickness. The symptoms rapidly worsened and revealed themselves as smallpox, and the boy was dead within a week. The couple’s three other little children were infected and one by one between November 1733 and January 1734 they all died. By early December 1733 Elizabeth herself was ‘confind to her Chamber and pretty much to her bed’. When her two small daughters died at the beginning of the new year, their mother was too weak to be told. By 6 February 1734 this poor woman had finally succumbed.
    Robert Dundas retreated to London to mourn ‘the best of mothers’ and ‘an incomparable wife’. But as one door closed for him, another was about to open. A couple of weeks before the arrival of the smallpox at Arniston, Dundas had paid a visit to a client in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, a region stretching south from the town of Carluke, about nineteen miles south-east of Glasgow. Sir William Gordon was the owner of two conjoined estates, Hallcraig and Milton, which extended west from Carluke along the dank northern edge of a small brook called Jock’s Gill, then reached up onto wide fertile plains, before dropping down into the lush crook of the river Clyde, where the road stopped for want of a bridge. Sir William was a canny operator, one of the very few to have made money from the South Sea Bubble – the stockmarket crash that had devastated Britain’s economy in 1720 – and he had been seeking legal advice from Dundas for over a decade. No doubt one of the chief attractions of Gordon’s case for his lawyer was his young daughter Ann: a spirited, flirtatious and enormously beautiful woman. Her portrait, painted by the famous Joseph Highmore and now hanging on a staircase in Arniston House, shows large dark eyes slanted in readiness to laugh, fashionably alabaster skin and teak-coloured hair from whose arrangements a few unruly curls escaped. Elizabeth Dundas, to whom writing did not come naturally, had not been able to accompany her husband to Lanarkshire on this occasion and she laboured over a formal apology to Ann, hoping to ‘have the happness [ sic ] to see’ the eighteen-year-old woman in Edinburgh soon.
    Robert Dundas’s visit to Milton in October 1733 lasted only a few days. His carriage