Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/286

248 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. Edinburgh ; he was requested to deny the authorship, but his refusal to plead, and his consequent retire- ment, were probably due to his contempt for people who could make the authorship of a book a barrier to civic honours. His brother William, however, afterwards filled the office with such satisfaction to his fellow-citizens, that he was re-elected, after serving the prescribed term of three years. Many of Robert Chambers's earliest essays in his Journal had been upon geology, and to this branch of science he became more and more addicted, and as a geologist and antiquarian he turned to good account a somewhat extensive course of foreign travel. In 1848 he visited Switzerland; in 1849 Sweden and Norway ; and in later years Iceland and the Faroe Isles, Canada, and the United States. One of the results of these travels was a volume on "Ancient Sea Margins" containing a new theory, that had pre- viously been propounded by him in a paper read be- fore the " British Association," and had attracted no little attention. To supplement what their Journal could not supply to the reading public, he and his brother also wrote, with not very much assistance, and, of course pub- lished, " Information for the People," " Papers for the People," and a series of miscellaneous tracts : 200,000 of the first named are said to have been sold. During all this hard work Robert Chambers helped to conduct one of the largest printing and publishing concerns in Scotland. One of the chiefest triumphs of the brothers was " Chambers's Educational Course/' an educational project so complete that few men could have ever hoped to realize it. This series be- gins with a three-halfpenny infant primer, and goes