COPLAND,
a surname originally English, and signifying a headland, from
caput, a head. At the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346, King
David the Second of Scotland was disarmed and taken prisoner by John
Copeland, a gentleman of Northumberland, who was governor of Roxburgh
Castle, although not without having knocked out two of Copeland’s
teeth with his gauntlet, in the struggle to free himself. Copeland
conveyed the wounded and bleeding monarch off the field, and on
refusing to deliver him up to the queen, who had remained at Newcastle
during the battle, King Edward, then at Calais, sent for him, when he
excused his refusal so handsomely that the king bestowed on him a
reward of five hundred a-year in lands near Wooler, which still bear
the name of Copland, and made him a knight banneret. From this Sir
John Copeland descended the Coplands of Collieston, in Dumfries-shire,
as well as others of the name in Scotland.
COPLAND, PATRICK,
LL.D.,
professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen, son of the minister of
Fintray, in Aberdeenshire, was born at the manse of that parish in
January 1749. Having obtained a bursary by competition, he received
his education at Marischal college and university of Aberdeen; and, on
March 28, 1775, he was elected professor of natural philosophy in that
institution In April 1779 he was transferred to the chair of
mathematics in the same university, which he filled till July 9, 1817,
when he again became professor of the natural philosophy class. He
taught with great reputation and success, for upwards of forty years,
and, on June 27, 1817, his colleagues conferred on him the honorary
degree of LL.D. in acknowledgment of his eminent services. His course
of natural philosophy was illustrated by one of the most extensive and
complete sets of apparatus in the kingdom, mostly the work of his own
hands, or made by workmen under his superintendence. As a lecturer, he
was distinguished by his clear method and impressive manner of
communicating knowledge, and fixing the attention of his hearers. He
was the first in the north of Scotland who gave a regular series of
popular lectures on natural philosophy, divesting that science of its
most abstruse calculations, and suiting the subject to the mechanic
and operative tradesman. His attention was also successfully directed
to other sciences. In Mr. Samuel Park’s ‘Chemical and Philosophical
Essays,’ due credit is given to Dr. Copland for having introduced into
this country an expeditious method of bleaching by oxymuriatic acid,
which had been shown to him merely as a curious chemical experiment by
the celebrated Professor De Saussure, while at Geneva with the duke of
Gordon, in 1787. Mr. Thomas Thomson, however, in the article Bleaching
in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, denies that Dr. Copland had any claim
to the first introduction of the new process into Great Britain,
ascribing the merit of it to the celebrated James Watt. During his
long and useful life, Dr. Copland was in frequent correspondence with
Watt, Telford, Maskelyne, Leslie, Olinthus Gregory, M. Biot, Dr.
Hutton, and other distinguished literary and scientific men. In 1782
he was elected a corresponding member of the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland, and, in 1807, an associate of the Linnaean Society of
London. Declining health caused him, in September 1822, to resign his
professorship, and he died November 10th of that year, in
the 73d year of his age. He married Elizabeth, daughter of Dr. David
Ogilvy, surgeon, R.N., by whom he had three sons and one daughter.
