method of establishing the solar parallax. The results are contained in the Dunecht Observatory Publications—a series long regarded as an important source of astronomical information. In 1888 Lord Crawford presented to the nation all his telescopes, instruments, and astronomical library, for the purpose of establishing an improved observatory at Edinburgh. Dr. Ralph Copeland, who had directed the observatory at Dunecht since 1876, was appointed in 1889 astronomer royal for Scotland, and the new Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill was opened by Lord Crawford in 1896.
During the rest of his life Lord Crawford made large collections of proclamations, broadsides, documents of the French Revolution, and postage stamps; he also collected a philatelic library which he bequeathed to the British Museum. He was an enthusiastic bibliophile, and added greatly to the splendid library inherited from his father. The manuscripts are now in the possession of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, with the exception of a series of English and Oriental manuscripts illustrating the progress of handwriting, which he presented to the free library of Wigan. He issued a number of catalogues and handlists, and also collations and notes of the rarer books in a valuable series of volumes entitled Bibliotheca Lindesiana (1883–1913). Though not a profound mathematician, he had considerable mechanical skill and took special interest in the development of electrical engineering, acting as chief British commissioner at the electrical exhibition in Paris in 1881. He rendered other service by scientific exploration in his yacht Valhalla.
Lord Crawford was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1878 and 1879, fellow of the Royal Society (1878), honorary associate of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (1883), and a trustee of the British Museum (1885). He also presided over the Royal Photographic Society, the Philatelic Society, and the Camden Society. He was invested knight of the Thistle in 1896 and held the volunteer decoration. In January 1913, at a meeting of the trustees of the British Museum, Lord Crawford was taken seriously ill. He died the following day, 31 January, at 2 Cavendish Square, and was buried at the old chapel of Balcarres House, Fife. He married in 1869 Emily Florence, second daughter of Colonel the Hon. Edward Bootle Wilbraham, and by her had issue, a daughter and six sons. He was succeeded as twenty-seventh Earl by his eldest son, David Alexander Edward Lindsay (born 1871).
[Obituary notices in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. lxxiv; Faraday House Journal, February 1913; Nature, 13 February 1913 (by Sir David Gill); London Philatelist, February and March 1913; Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, February 1913; G. Forbes, David Gill, Man and Astronomer, 1916; M. J. Nicoll, Three Voyages of a Naturalist, 1908; New Scots Peerage.]
LINDSAY, THOMAS MARTIN (1843–1914), historian, the eldest son of Alexander Lindsay, by his wife, Susan Irvine Martin, was born 18 October 1843 at Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, where his father was minister of the Relief church. He was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. At the latter, which he entered in 1861, his unusually brilliant achievement in the philosophical classes was crowned by the Ferguson scholarship and the Shaw fellowship, both open to graduates of any of the Scottish universities. He became assistant to Professor Alexander Campbell Fraser [q.v.], but abandoned the career of a university teacher in order to study for the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland. After completing his course at New College, Edinburgh (1869), he acted as assistant to the minister of St. George's Free church, Edinburgh.
In 1872, the general assembly of the Free Church elected Lindsay to the chair of church history in its theological college at Glasgow, to the duties of which were added, in 1902, those of principal of the college. This appointment diverted his studies from philosophy to history, and his translation of Ueberweg's Logic (1871), to which he appended some original dissertations, remained his only philosophical publication. He was at once recognized as an able and inspiring historical teacher, but his zeal for social work, and especially for foreign missions, at first restricted his literary output, though he found time for wide and varied reading. He reorganized the administration of the important missions supported by his Church, acquiring an acknowledged mastery of their complicated financial arrangements, and he was convener of the foreign missions committee from 1886 to 1900. He visited the mission fields in Syria and spent a year in India. Apart from brief but well-constructed text-books on the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Reformation, the literary product of his earlier professional
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