James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo , born in 1714 in Kincardineshire in Scotland and dead the May 16th 1799, is a Philosophe and Scottish Philologue .

Its principal work is a bulky Traité on the origin and progress of the language (1774 - 92, 6 vol. in-8°), where many clever things are found and of Paradoxe S. One quotes also his Métaphysique old (6 vol. in-4°).

Burnett was known for its eccentricity. He often affirmed to maintain his physical condition while following the practices the ancient Greeks and made usually the way of Edinburgh to London with horse. Once where a decision on the value of a horse had been returned against him, he refused to sit with the other judges, preferring to sit down below the court with the clerks. Leaving one day downpour of the court where he officiated, he quietly placed his wig in his post chaise before being turned over some at his place to foot. Once of 1787 which it was at the royal court, part of the ceiling of the court started to crumble. Burnett which, 71 years old, was almost deaf and short-sighted, was the only one not to precipitate outside. When one asked him for the reason of it, he answered that he had believed that it was “an annual ceremony, to which, as a foreigner, he did not have anything to see”.

Burnett also curiously seemed worried by the relation of the man to the other primates. Having developed in its Treated on the origin and progress of the language , the idea that the man was an improved monkey, he clearly believed, in his first years that the orang-outang was the shape of man. He went until affirming that the human ones were to be born with tails which the midwives quite simply removed with the birth, opinion that he repudiated in 1773. If its sights were ridiculed by its contemporaries, many commentators described it thereafter as announcing the evolutionary theories of Darwin because he clearly asserted owing to the fact that the animal species adapt and change to survive, and his observations on the adaptive progression of the primates to the man clearly underline his concepts on the evolution.

References

E.L. Cloyd, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1972)
William Angus Knight, Lord Monboddo and nap off his contemporaries London, John Murray, 1900 ISBN 1-85506-207-0
W.L. Nichols, “Lord Monboddo”, Notes and Queries , VII , 281 (1853)

Source

Gustave Vapereau, universal Dictionary of the literatures , Paris, Hatchet, 1876, p. 1321

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