Hermits and Termits was looking splendid on Monday morning last. It has had a braw makeover.
Since my training in Landscape Architecture this auld hoose has held my fascination. It features in the series of films I made on Dr Samuel Brown. I was mesmerised by the portrait of Dr Samuel Brown in the National Gallery of Scotland:
Samuel Brown studied medicine but chose not to follow this as a career. Instead he chose to be: a chemist, a physicist, a poet, a writer, an artist and a philosopher.
In the early 1840s he delivered lectures on the Atomic Theory where he claimed that he could transmute Carbon into Silicon. Thereafter his life changed. This film tells the story:
The catalytic action of his mere presence
A century before C.P Snow and the “two culture debate”, Dr Samuel Brown demonstrated that the cultures of science and arts do indeed complement one another. In this film we hear the words of Dr Samuel Brown, a scientist interested in poetry; and Edwin Morgan, a poet interested in science:
Dr Samuel Brown’s father, also Samuel, was an Ironmonger in Haddington. Samuel Brown Senior was the pioneer of public libraries. This film will hopefully illuminate:
The National Gallery portrait of Dr Samuel Brown was painted by his friend, David Scott, RSA. David Scott grew up in the Edinburgh House known as Hermits and Termits:
Stars have shone
and gradually increasing in brilliancy
they have promised to equal
the brightest of astral orbs
when suddenly
they have disappeared forever.
