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their minutes their sense of the value of his services and their regret at the loss to the Society of such a distinguished chemist. At the same time they congratulated him on having been appointed to such an honourable position." At the Society's general meeting on 16th June 1875, the final report by Professor Dewar referred to the steadily increasing work load which he had had. "During the past three weeks alone I have analysed twenty samples of manures and feeding stuffs". Only one serious instance of adulteration had come to his notice. A sample of penguin guano contained 32% sand and clay. The market price was £10 per ton and he estimated the worth of the sample to be about £5 per ton. One case of suspected poisoning had occurred recently and the stomach was found to contain lead. There is a nigger in every wood pile and at this meeting it was in the form of a 'gentleman' farmer, Milne Home from Wedderburn, who complained that "Dr Anderson had got into bad health and for two years drew his salary without doing anything for the Society and his assistant, Mr Dewar, had told them that he was not so much an agricultural as a scientific chemist. . . . They had therefore been paying for two years £1,000 to these two gentlemen and they had not had a bit of work done for the benefit of the Society." When Mr Dewar asked leave to reply to these stupid remarks, as he no doubt would have done most effectively, for he had a sharp tongue, the chairman ruled that it would be out of order - and the 'gentleman farmer' should have been grateful! At the next meeting on January 19th 1876, with Dr Anderson now dead and Professor Dewar safely away in Cambridge the 'gentleman farmer', now uninhibited, returned to his abuse of these two loyal and distinguished servants of the Society. One, however, cannot leave this phase of James Dewar's career without the comment that had he continued as chemist to The Highland Society and been given the unstinted support of its members, which his ability and enthusiasm undoubtedly merited, he would have become the most distinguished chemist in its history whose work as a pioneer of good husbandry, in all its aspects, would have been of inestimable benefit to Scottish farming. But it was not to be. His departure for Cambridge and eventually London was, if to Scottish farming a great loss, an immense gain to other branches of chemical research and for himself the first step on the road which was to lead to an international reputation and enduring fame.
Engrossed as he was to be all his life in chemistry as a teacher and researcher James Dewar did not neglect the humanities. Sir James Crichton Brown who knew him intimately spoke of him as "being deeply read in general literature and a great lover of poetry as he was of her sister music, as well as a connoisseur of painting and objets d'art". We may be sure that these cultural interests were not neglected during his busy youthful years in Edinburgh and that the strains of the Tulliallan fiddle would be often heard in his lodgings. In his Edinburgh years he was also a frequenter of the theatre, as a witness a letter which he wrote to Lady Martin on 25th February 1893 in which, after thanking her for a copy of her book, he says, "I regard the gift as a very great honour. The personal interest to me is beyond all expression, seeing that your embodiment of Shakespeare's heroines were the means of instilling into my youthful mind love and appreciation of truth and beauty. Without this spiritual impulse life would have indeed been poorer".
He and his brother, Alexander, were members of Bristo United Presbyterian Church whose junior minister, the Rev. Thomas Dunlop, inducted on 13th June 1871, assisted at his marriage. The intimation of the event in The Scotsman is as follows: "At 19 Grange Loan on the 8th August 1871, by the Rev. Dr Wallace, Old Greyfriars, assisted by the Rev. Thomas Dunlop, Bristo United Presbyterian Church, James Dewar F.R.S.E. to Helen Ross, eldest surviving daughter of the late William Banks, Engraver and Printer, Edinburgh". Theirs was to prove a singularly happy marriage, as those who knew them longest and most intimately, were to testify on the occasion of their golden wedding celebrations. "His wife's influence over him was absolute," wrote Professor Armstrong, 'and his devotion to her was increasing and measureless." (note 15)
During his Edinburgh years James Dewar became know to an increasingly wide circle of scientists through his articles in Nature and his participation in the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At their meetings in Liverpool in 1870 he communicated two papers to the Chemical Section, entitled Notes on Thermal Equivalents: a) Fermentation and b) Oxide of Chlorine. This was followed in June 1871 with a report on "The Thermal Equivalents of the Oxides of Chlorine”. The results, he said, were merely... NEXT PAGE
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