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traced the course of the Quorra or Niger from Boussa,
where Park fell, down to the Gulf of Guinea, they
were unable to explore a great part of that immense
portion of it which flows between Boussa and Tim-
buctoo, and which Park must of necessity have navi-
gated. Their united labours have, however, solved
the grand problem which has engaged the attention
of all civilized nations from the earliest ages to which
history leads us back; and there seems little cause
for doubt, that, in a short time, the still broken links
in the great chain of communication with the centre
of Africa will be united.
PARK, PATRIC. This talented sculptor, whose
career was cut short by a premature death when his
professional excellence had attained maturity and
given promise of a career of distinction, was born in
Glasgow in 1811. His father was Matthew Park, a
distinguished builder in that city, who erected the
new part of Hamilton Palace. Having shown in
early life a decided taste for art, especially in relation
to sculpture, he went to Rome, and studied as a pupil
under Thorwaldsen; and on his return he settled in
London, and was much employed in bust-sculpture,
so that at different periods he had a studio in Glasgow
and Edinburgh, and in the later period of his life at
Manchester. Among the numerous busts which he
executed of the most eminent characters of the day,
was one of Napoleon III., whom, as a subject for
an artist, he greatly admired, and of whom he pro-
duced a likeness in marble distinguished for its faith-
fulness of resemblance and beauty of execution. This
bust is now in the South Kensington Museum. Of
his other busts we may particularize those of Thomas
Campbell, author of the Pleasures of Hope; of Mr.
Layard, M.P., General Sir Charles Napier, the Duke
of Cambridge, Lord Macaulay (now in possession of
Lady Trevelyan), Lord Jeffrey, D. O. Hill, R.S.A.,
Sir Archibald Alison, and Professor Ayton; and of
these, the last two have been engraved. Another
bust not inferior to his choicest productions, entitled
A Scottish Lassie, now belonging to the Royal Scot-
tish Academy, and placed in the National Gallery
of Scotland at Edinburgh, being a likeness of his
wife idealized, is particularly worthy of notice and
commendation.
Although the excellence of Patric Park as an artist
was thus so generally recognized, and so largely em-
ployed, he was dissatisfied with the mere production
of busts; his ambition aspired to complete large,
open-air statues, a higher department of art, and
better fitted for his genius; but in this longing he
was disappointed, as no commission of the kind was
offered to him. It may have been that the eccen-
tricities of genius, of which he had no small share,
would have made his idealizations not only too
poetical for the common taste, but have overrun the
established bounds of art; and that in public monu-
mental effigy, with the prosaic multitude for judges,
he would have only subjected himself to failure, and
it may be also to ridicule. At all events, such was
the result of the only attempt he made upon the
public to vindicate his claims as a sculptor of history.
The subject of his selection was an allegorical statue
of Sir William Wallace; the place of its exhibition
was Edinburgh; and in due time the eyes of Modem
Athens were astonished with the display of a colossal
sure of Mr. Park's company at dinner on Tuesday next, at
half-past five o'clock. An answer is requested.
"Strand, 9th Nov. 1804."
These were the only written documents belonging to Park
which the Messrs. Landers, after the most anxious inquiries
and investigations, were able to discover. They succeeded,
however, in recovering his double-barrelled gun, and the  tobe,
or short cloak, which he wore when he was drowned.
statue of the revered national champion in plaster of
Paris with the Scottish lion by his side. Could this
be Wallace ? Nothing was to be seen but a huge,
burly, naked athlete, ready for the field of glory, and
the lion raising his tail in token that he was ready to
second the onset. The puzzled spectators, unless
they had been told that this king of men and king of
beasts meant the Scottish hero and the Scottish na-
tion, might have mistaken it for Samson and the lion
which he tore in pieces, or  Androclus and his shaggy
friend of the forest taking an airing after the lamed
foot of the latter had been cured; and they departed
in dudgeon, as if a deception had been played upon
them, instead of pausing to admire the artistic beauty
of the model. Notwithstanding the adverse remarks
of the general public, which were exclusively levelled
at a mistaken mode of treatment, critics recognized
in this colossal figure a work of high genius and of
great merit.
In 1851 Mr. Park was elected an associate of the
Royal Scottish Academy of Painting, Sculpture,
and Architecture, and was subsequently chosen an
Academician. His death was sudden and tragic.
He had gone from Manchester, where he now re-
sided, to Warrington, where he was employed upon
the bust of a gentleman who had given him a sitting,
and was returning to the railway station at War-
rington, when he perceived a porter endeavouring to
carry a trunk that was too heavy for him. Park
hurried forward to assist him; but in attempting to
raise the load he overtasked his strength, and burst
a blood-vessel, by which his death was occasioned
almost instantaneously. This melancholy event
occurred on the 16th of August, 1855, and his worth
and talents were thus recorded in the annual report
of that year by the Royal Scottish Academy:�
"A vacancy has occurred in the list of academi-
cians by the premature and lamented death of their
highly talented brother academician Patric Park,
Esq., sculptor, an event which occurred suddenly at
Warrington on the 16th of August last. Mr. Park
had at the time of his decease only attained the age
of forty-four years; and being an enthusiastic student
and lover of his profession, his works, especially his
portrait-busts�long distinguished by some of the
highest qualities of his noble art�seemed every suc-
ceeding year to gain in strength and refinement, so
that had life been spared many works of still higher
excellence might have been looked for from his pro-
lific studio. The Academy exhibitions for a long
series of years past, and none of them more strikingly
than that of 1855, when his fine bust of the Emperor
of the French occupied a place of honour, sufficiently
attest the justice of this brief  eulogium of the council,
and justify their sorrow that, in the death of  Patric
Park, the Academy has lost one of its most talented
members, and the department of sculpture in which
he more peculiarly excelled one of its most eminent
professors."
Mr. Park, as already noticed, was married; his wife
was daughter of Robert Carruthers, Esq., Inverness,
by whom he had four sons and a daughter.
PATEESON, WILLIAM, the original projector of
the Bank of England and of Scotland, and of the
celebrated settlement of Darien, was born, it is sup-
posed, in the year 1655, at  Skipmyre, in the parish
of  Tinwald, Dumfriesshire. It is deeply to be re-
gretted that no satisfactory memorials have been pre-
served of this remarkable man. Of his education
nothing is known, but it is stated in one memoir that
he was bred to the church. That Mr.  Paterson
was either a churchman or a buccaneer at any period
of his life appears a gratuitous assumption,  unsup-