Logan plaque, Lurgan, Northern Ireland
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administrator Botanist jurist scientist statesman scholars
Logan was born on October 20, 1674, in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, of Scottish parents. His father, Patrick Logan, was an Episcopalian clergyman turned Quaker who headed a Latin school in Lurgan. His mother, Isabel Hume, came of a noble family connected with the lairds of Dundas. The family moved in 1690 from Lurgan to Bristol, where Patrick Logan taught school assisted by his eldest son, William, who became a distinguished physician.
Logan early showed a scholarly aptitude. Before he was thirteen he had received from his father a creditable knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and at nineteen, upon his father's return to Ireland, he was left in charge of the school at Bristol. James continued his studies until 1697.
In 1699 Logan accepted William Penn’s invitation to accompany him to Pennsylvania as his secretary. On his return to England in 1701, Penn left the twenty-seven-year-old Logan in charge of his affairs. For over four decades - as administrator, land agent, and merchant - he represented, not without dispute, the interests of Penn and his heirs. He was first secretary to and then for most of his life a member of the provincial council, mayor of Philadelphia in 1722-1723, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1731-1739, and acting governor of the colony in 1736-1737. He negotiated treaties with the Indians and foresaw a clash with the French on the frontiers. He designed the Conestoga wagon to transport trade goods to Indian country and furs for export back to Philadelphia. He became rich through personal investments in land and an active mercantile trade.
On his second trip to England in 1723-1724, Logan procured a set of sheets of Edmond Halley’s still unpublished moon tables and added to them an explanation of Halley’s method and an account of his own observation of the solar eclipse of 11 May 1724, which he watched at Windsor with members of the Penn family. Many of his astronomical books, some of which he procured from the widow of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, the German scientist and pietism, are full of notes, corrections, and comments, including Flamsteed’s suppressed calculations of stars which Logan inserted in his own copy of Hevelius’ Prodromus Astronomiae.
Early in 1728 Logan slipped on ice and broke the head of his thighbone; it never healed, and he was lame for the rest his life. In 1730, after moving to his country house, Stenton, in Germantown, he tried with only moderate success to free himself of administrative responsibilities so that he could devote himself to his books. His translation of the pseudo-Cato’s Moral Distichs was printed by Franklin in 1735, and his more famous version of Cicero’s Cato major, written in 1733, was issued in 1744, also from Franklin’s press. These, as well as his scientific articles, were minor works.
In 1742 Logan decided to bequeath his extensive library for public use and to spend his remaining years increasing it. By a codicil to his will, canceled because of a disagreement with his son-in-law, Isaac Norris, who had been named one of the trustees, he had left his books to be installed in a building at Sixth and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia.
After his death his children established the Bibliotheca Loganiana, then consisting of about 2,600 volumes, as a trust in accordance with their father’s unfulfilled intentions. In 1792 the trust was transferred to the Library Company of Philadelphia, where the books have remained ever since.
The most intellectually capable scientist of colonial America, Logan published works in botany and optics. His major contribution, however, lay in his acknowledged competence in science and in the help and advice that he gave to Thomas Godfrey, John Bartram, Benjamin Franklin, and Cadwallader Colden.
In Philadelphia, the Logan neighborhood and the landmark Logan Square are named for him.
Logan dominated the aristocratic Proprietary Party and greatly influenced provincial administration. He was opposed by the democratic faction, which wanted reduced proprietary authority. He supported proprietary rights in Pennsylvania.
He opposed Quaker pacifism and war tax resistance, and encouraged pacifist Quakers to give up their seats in the Pennsylvania Assembly so that it could make war requisitions.
Thomas Godfrey, a glazier, was introduced to higher mathematics by Logan and became so proficient that he invented an improved mariner’s quadrant. In 1732 Logan vigorously defended Godfrey’s claim to the invention before the Royal Society against the simultaneous announcement of a similar instrument by John Hadley. His letters on behalf of Godfrey were supplemented by his own communications to the Royal Society, including in 1735 a preliminary essay on the generation of Indian corn, and in 1736 observations on a Hebrew shekel (which he sent as a gift), further notes on his corn experiments, a theory to explain the crooked aspect of lightning, and a hypothesis to account for the huge appearance of the moon on the horizon. He was, however, never made a fellow of the Royal Society.
In 1727 Logan read of the theories of seminal preformation and aerial pollination and began his own experiments with Indian corn. After his initial letter to the Royal Society, he worked to improve his techniques and to make his conclusions more explicit. Although the British scientists took little notice of his work, it was received enthusiastically on the Continent. Linnaeus hailed Logan as one of the heroes of botany, and Johann Friedrich Gronovius saw that the essay was published in full at Leiden in 1739 as Experimenta et meletemata de plantarum. Others had noted the sexuality of plants and pollination; Logan, by covering the flowers of corn with linen bags and by cutting off the tassels, demonstrated how the pollen generates kernels, or seeds, by ascending the tassels. Fothergill translated the work into English as Experiments and Considerations on the Generation of Plants, and it was published in London in 1747, Logan’s work, a pioneer step toward plant hybridization, was referred to throughout the century. Within a year of the publication of Linnaeus’ Systema naturae in 1735 Logan had acquired a copy. He introduced the “natural” naturalist, John Bartram, to the advances in taxonomy and taught him enough Latin to be able to read Linnaeus. It was through his encouragement and introductions that Bartram became known to botanists abroad.
Logan’s scientific virtuosity found other expression. His simplification of Christiaan Huygens’ method of finding the refraction of a lens appeared at the end of his Experimenta as "Canonum pro inveniendis refractionum." A second work in optics was even bolder. Starting with Huygens and going beyond Newton, he tried to show that the laws of spherical aberration could be more briefly expressed mathematically otherwise than geometrically. His treatise Demonstrationes de radiorum lucis in superficies sphaericas was reprinted at Leiden in 1741 with the help of Gronovius, whose colleague Pieter van Musschenbroek read the proofs. Such was Logan’s at home that Franklin brought him the accounts of his experiments in electricity to read before he sent them off to England.
Logan was a man of aristocratic bearing and commanding presence. He has been described as "scholarly and genial among his friends, but harsh and unfair in his judgment of his enemies." In his politics, his manner of life, and his tastes, he represented the aristocracy of the intellect and the antithesis of the democracy.
Physical Characteristics: Logan is described as "tall and well-proportioned, with a graceful yet grave demeanor. He had a good complexion, and was quite florid, even in old age; nor did his hair, which was brown, turn grey in the decline of life, nor his eyes require spectacles."
In 1714 Logan married Sarah Read; the couple had five children. James, his eldest son, became the first librarian of the Loganian Library, which was formed into the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1792. His daughter, Sarah, married Isaac Norris.
Around 1730 Godfrey invented the octant.
