BURNET, James, Lord Monboddo, a senator of the college of justice, was born about the year 1714. He was the son of Mr Burnet of Monboddo in Kincardineshire. After passing through the usual course of school education, he prosecuted his studies at the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Leyden, with distinguished reputation. He was admitted an advocate in 1737; and on the 12th of February 1767, he was raised to the bench by the title of Lord Monboddo.
A journey to London became a favourite amusement of his periods of vacation from the business of the court; and for a time he made this journey once a year. A carriage, a vehicle that was not in common use among the ancients, he considered as an engine of effeminacy and sloth, which it was disgraceful for a man to make use of in travelling. To be dragged at the tail of a horse, instead of mounting upon his back, seemed, in his eyes, to be a truly ludicrous degradation of the genuine dignity of human nature: in all his journeys, therefore, between Edinburgh and London, he was wont to ride on horseback, with a single servant attending him. He continued this practice, without finding it too fatiguing for his strength, till he was upwards of eighty years of age.
Lord Monboddo is well known to the world as a man of letters. His first publication was The Origin and Progress of Language, in two vols. 8vo, 1773, which were followed by four more volumes, the last being published not long before his death. In this work, intended chiefly to vindicate the honour of Grecian literature, he ascribes the origin of alphabetical writing to the Egyptians; and strenuously maintains that the ourang-outang is a class of the human species, and that his want of speech is merely accidental. He also endeavours to establish the reality of the existence of mermaids, and other fictitious animals. He was induced to undertake another work for the purpose of defending the cause of Grecian philosophy, and published, in five vols. 4to, a work entitled Ancient Metaphysics, which, like the other, is remarkable for a surprising mixture of erudition and genius, with the most absurd whim and conceit.
As a judge his decisions were sound, upright, and learned, marked with acute discrimination, and free from those paradoxes and partialities which appear in his writings. He attended his judicial duty with indefatigable diligence till within a few days of his death, which happened at his house in Edinburgh on the 26th of May 1799, at the advanced age of eighty-five.