Great Scots of Note: Scotland on Britannia

Gateway to the British Isles since 1996

Scots Who Made A Difference

by Peter N. Williams, Ph.D.
© 2007 Britannia.com

H
HERRIES, JOHN MAXWELL, 4th Baron (1512-83)
John Maxwell Herries earns his place among those who mattered simply because he played a part in persuading Mary, Queen of Scots to submit her case in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley to judgment of the English Queen, Elizabeth I. As a consequence, Mary was imprisoned in England for the rest of her life with untold results upon subsequent Scottish history. A staunch adherent of the Scottish Queen, Herries had led her cavalry against the Scottish rebels at The Battle of Langside in 1568 and sheltered the unfortunate Queen after her defeat.

HILL, DAVID OCTAVIUS (1802-70)
Along with his companion Robert Adamson, Perth-born David Hill was responsible for producing some of the greatest photographic portraits of the 19th century, and thus had a profound influence upon later portrait photography. A founding member of the Royal Scottish Academy, Hill began his career as a painter but became well-known after publishing a series of landscapes printed by the new process of lithography. In 1843, instead of painting them, he and Adamson made photographic portraits of the delegates at a session to commemorate the founding of the Free Church of Scotland. They used the calotype, which they perfected, rather than the daguerrotype and produced a remarkable series of clear, carefully composed portraits that showed just what could be done with the new medium. They also produced pictures of Edinburgh and many surrounding villages.

HISLOP, JOSEPH (1884-1977)
Edinburgh-born Joseph Hislop won fame as one of the world's leading operatic tenors, achieving great success in the first part of this century in Argentina and the US. Trained in Sweden, he was especially in demand for the leading roles in Puccini, appearing with some of the most famous singers of his era, including Gigli, Galli Curci, Melba, Tetrazzini and Chaliapin. The latter particularly praised the talents of the Scots tenor. After retiring from active stage work, Hislop returned to Sweden to become a tutor to many of the world's great opera stars, including Birgit Nilsson and Jussi Bjorling.

HOGG, JAMES (1770-1835)
"The Etrick Shepherd," James Hogg enjoyed a brief period of popularity during the ballad revival at the time of the Romantic movement in literature. Not too many of his prolific output have survived the test of lasting value, but some of his poems, including Kilmeny and The Witch of Fife inspired Sir Walter Scott. Scott used some of the self-taught, but highly intelligent and certainly skilled shepherd poet's material in his own Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Modern critics consider Hogg's best work his satirical Confession a supposed diary of one who believes himself free from all moral law as he is a Calvinist and thus has a free ticket to Heaven.

HORNE, HENRY SINCLAIR, 1st Baron (1861-1929)
From Caithness, Henry Sinclair Horne began his military career as an artillery man in 1880 with the British Army, but it is in World War l that he made his reputation by directing the very first combat test of the newly invented tank at the Battle of the Somme. During the final struggles of the long, bloody conflict, Sinclair was able to overcome the strongest part of the famed Hindenberg Line.

HUME, ALLEN ACTAVIAN (1829-1912)
Born in Montrose, Angus, Allen Hume entered the Indian Civil Service in 1849, serving first as a magistrate during the time of the great Indian Mutiny, and then as a member of the board of revenue in the North West Provinces. One of the few British administrators who favored greater participation of Indians in their own affairs, Hume was kept quiet in minor positions in the provinces. But upon retiring from government service in 1862, he became involved in political activities that favored democratic, representational government for the people of India. An ornithologist as well as an active politician, completing The Game Birds of India, Burmah and Ceylon (1879-8l), Hume was one of the leading advocates of the Indian National Congress which he helped convene in Bombay in 1885 and in which he served as General Secretary for its first 22 years.

HUME, DAVID (1711-76)
The credit for the conception of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science of human nature belongs to Edinburgh native David Hume, surely one of the most influential thinkers of all time and deserving of the title "the high priest of reason." Hume's writings were legion. They include Treatise of Human Nature (1739) in which the core of his thinking was expressed, and which was basically restated in his influential Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Considered without doubt the most thoroughgoing and strategically logical British skeptic of all time, Hume tried to explain how the mind works in acquiring knowledge. He concluded that no theory of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond experience.

Regarded as one of the few classical British philosophers in history (with Francis Bacon and John Locke), Hume held that nothing could be known by the mind but its own "impressions" (sensations) and "ideas" (faint copies of impressions). Opposed to most metaphysical concepts, he attempted to destroy doctrines that seemed baseless or irrelevant, including most religious beliefs, which were merely sentiments. To Hume, there are no "eternal verities." Common sense was everything, for it provided a way of keeping the world from being merely chaos of sensation. His writings strongly influenced the German philosopher Kant, and the British philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham.

Mainly due to his radical, far-reaching and often despised philosophy, (at least in religious circles), Hume's greatest popular success came in the writing of history. As Keeper of the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, he had ready access to the materials he wanted in order to succeed in his ambitions as a historian. His History of England from the Invasions of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (8 volumes) was completed in 1762. As a Scot, Hume's bias was in favor of the Stuarts; his book was the most popular of all British histories for well over a century, having a strong impact on Winston Churchill who read it as a "boyhood manual."

HUME, JOSEPH (1777-1855)
Born in Montrose, Angus, and father of Allan Octavian, Joseph Hume became a radical politician after becoming wealthy as a businessman in India and buying himself a seat in the House of Commons. He earned his reputation by challenging every single item of public expenditure and bringing it to a direct vote. Hume's persuasive powers and advocacy of free trade led to the repeal of the laws prohibiting the export of machinery and the act that prevented the emigration of skilled workmen.

Hume also spoke out against the Combination Acts that had made trade unionism illegal. Other social reforms initiated by this tireless Scots reformer involved issues such as the nefarious and much abused system flogging in the armed services, the impressment of sailors and imprisonment for debt. He also advocated Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, both considered extremely radical ideas in his time.

HUNTER, JOHN (1728-93)
From Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, Hunter a brilliant surgeon and investigator helped revolutionize many aspects of medicine, especially surgery. The founder of pathological anatomy in Britain, John was an early advocate of investigation and experimentation. Untrained by any university, he had learned his craft assisting his brother William, the famed teacher and obstetrician in preparing for dissections. He also learned surgery from a doctor at St. George's Hospital, London in 1756 and was himself admitted to the Corporation of Surgeons in 1768.

After carrying out many experiments in pathology and comparative aspects of anatomy, morphology, biology and physiology, Hunter presented his findings in his popular lectures in London. He also described phlebitis, pyemis and shock. One of his students was Edward Jenner, later to become famous as the discoverer of vaccination. Hunter was appointed Surgeon General to the Army as well as private physician to King George III.

At one time, Hunter inoculated himself with syphilis to show that gonorrhea and syphilis are manifestations of a single disease. Perhaps his most important contribution was to show that aneurysms could be treated by a single proximal ligature using thread or wire, thus making thousands of yearly amputations totally unnecessary.

Hunter's writings include The Natural History of the Human Teeth (177l), A Treatise on the Veneraal Disease (1786), Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Oeconomy (1786) and A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds (1794).

HUNTER, WILLIAM (1718-83)
For centuries the care of women during and after pregnancy (obstetrics) had been left in the hands of mid-wives, often woefully unskilled in their profession. That obstetrics ultimately became an accepted branch of medicine is mainly due to the high standards of teaching and medical practice of Calderwood, Lanarkshire-born William Hunter, brother of John. Hunter's medical studies in France led him to introduce into Britain the practice of using cadavers for dissection. In 1768, he became the newly-formed Royal Academy's professor in anatomy, devoting his medical practice entirely to obstetrics and assisting in the pregnancies of Queen Charlotte.

William introduced a whole new and highly lucrative industry to the world, for he was the first person to report fully on arterial and cavity embalming as a way to preserve bodies for burial. World-wide attention came to this most modern of the sciences when William ambled the body of Mrs. Martin Van Butchell, whose will specified that her husband had control of her fortune only as long as her body remained above ground. The wily husband had his deceased wife embalmed, dressed fashionably and placed in a glass-lidded case, holding regular visiting hours at their London house.

In the US, the practice of embalming became widespread after the great distances involved in the Civil War made it imperative to send bodies home for burial in a preserved state. It was also promoted vigorously by a new group of businessmen who saw fat profits in the undertaking.

Hunter's most important writings can be found in his The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures (1774). He also wrote a number of essays and case histories that deal with the circulatory, skeletal and reproductive systems.

HUTCHESON, FRANCIS (1694-1746)
The greatest influence of Francis Hutcheson, one of the originators of utilitarianism and one who taught at Glasgow University in English, not the usual Latin, was his contribution to the general principles that govern law and government known as jurisprudence. It was especially of interest to and highly influenced the writings of Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist. Hutcheson's moral-sense theory also had a profound effect on David Hume, for it may have given the world-renowned Scottish thinker the basis for his own naturalistic philosophy.

HUTTON, JAMES (1726-97)
In the early history of geology, (a relatively late field of study), the name of James Hutton (along with that of fellow-Scot Charles Lyell) is of note. Hutton had the misfortune of living in an age when scientific knowledge of fossils was rudimentary; he even admitted that his own interest in "figured stones" was not so much their biological affinity, but their mineralogical nature. He also was a strong advocate for the then-standard notion that each species was a divine creation and that, fossils represent essentially the same species that exist today.

Yet Hutton's pioneering work in outlining the principles of evolution by "natural selection" anticipated Charles Darwin by more than 50 years. Apparently, Hutton had written an unpublished manuscript Elements of Agriculture in which he briefly laid out the idea of adaptation through random variation and selective survival. Much of his thesis came from his work as a farmer, conducting experiments in plant growth and nutrition.

Before Hutton, the theories of Abraham Werner of Saxony had been generally accepted. Werner believed that all rocks were deposits of a great ocean that once covered the entire earth. That was all to change after Hutton turned the study of geology on its ear with his 1794 publication of Investigations of Principles of Knowledge, followed one year later by Theory of the Earth. He realised that the present rate of geologic processes, such as erosion of rocks and deposition of sediment, were sufficient to account for all the earth's features given a vastly longer period of time than the 6,000 years generally interpreted from the Bible.

After Lyell's writings appeared in 1830, Hutton's ideas were given grudging credibility. Summing up, we can safely say that Hutton pioneered scientific geology by originating the theory of the formation of the earth's crust and by proposing the doctrine of uniformitarianism.commander-in-chief, John French (who had failed to capitalize on early British successes at Ypres when the tank first saw action), Haig's Somme offensive cost the British forces almost half a million casualties; his costly errors were repeated at Passchendaele.

All that we can say in Haig's favor is that the German armies were suffering much the same kind of losses in their own misguided trench warfare, so that peace eventually did come when both sides were practically exhausted. When Haig did get his act together, he helped stop the last German offensive of the war and led the victorious allied assault, greatly aided by the fresh American troops and their supplies that finally brought the armistice. Before the outbreak of war, Haig had helped establish the Territorial Army ("The Terriers") as a useful army reserve. After the war, Haig organized the British Legion for ex-servicemen.

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