Series 5 > Miscellany [of the Scottish History Society] XIII

COLIN MACLAURIN’S JOURNAL OF THE 'FORTY-FIVE
edited by Bruce A. Hedman
INTRODUCTION
Colin Maclaurin (1698-1746) was Scotland’s most brilliant
mathematician in the eighteenth century. He occupied the chair of
mathematics of the University of Edinburgh, and was an eyewitness to
the events leading to that city’s surrender to the Jacobite army in 1745.
He compiled a journal of these events, which apparently was preserved in
a file of evidence prepared for the trial of Lord Provost Archibald Stewart
for treason after the rebellion. Maclaurin was a leader of the Hanoverian
sympathizers who attempted to prepare Edinburgh to resist the Jacobites.
This edition publishes for the first time the complete text of Maclaurin’s
Journal of the ’Forty-five.
Maclaurin’s prolific publications anticipated much of the progress
mathematics was to make in the next century.1 However, due to his
untimely death two of his most popular works appeared only
posthumously. On his death bed Maclaurin dictated the final chapter of
An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries. Then A
Treatise of Algebra, which had been circulated for twenty years as a
working manuscript among his students, became the most popular
algebra text in Great Britain for the next fifty years. Both were edited by
Patrick Murdoch and published in 1748. The royalties benefited
Maclaurin’s widow and five young children. Maclaurin’s Algebra went
into a sixth edition at London in 1796.
Perhaps such rich posthumous material sparked an interest among
Maclaurin’s biographers as to the circumstances of his early death.
Patrick Murdoch prefaced the first edition of An Account (London, 1748)
with a ‘Life and Writings of the Author’. There he blamed Maclaurin’s
death, which occurred on 14 June 1746, on his over-exertions to prepare
1 J.V. Grabiner, The Origins of Cauchy’s Rigorous Calculus (Cambridge, Mass., 1981),
16-46.