Born on a farm in Dumfriesshire in 1658 of a family notable in old Scottish history, he was, at the age of sixteen, transferred to the care of a kinswoman at Bristol, on whose death he inherited some property. Bristol was then a great commercial emporium, doing with much legitimate business a little in the slave trade, and his connection with that town was afterwards injurious to him, for whilst his friends said that he visited the New World as a missionary, his enemies asserted that he was mixed up with slave-dealing, and occasionally indulged in piracy. But the fact of his marrying the widow of a Puritan minister at Boston is more in accordance with the statements of his friends than with those of his enemies. Anderson, the historian of commerce, who as a lad must have known him in his old age, speaks of him as ’a merchant who had been much in foreign countries, and had entered far into speculations relating to commerce and the colonies.’ He was in England in 1681, and, among the various schemes he started, he took a leading part in the project for bringing water into the north of London from the Hampstead and Highgate hills. He made a heavy investment in the City of London Orphans’ Fund; in the improved management and distribution of that charity he took a profound interest, a fact which leaves no doubt of his philanthropic and public spirit. It was in 1684 that he first conceived the idea of the Darien scheme, and though this turned out so unfortunate, he from first to last acted with rare disinterestedness; his errors were those such as a well-balanced and generous mind might fall into without reproach. Nor is the failure of that enterprise to be attributed to him, but to the conduct of William III., who had sanctioned, but afterwards, at the instigation of the East India Companies of England and Holland, discouraged and positively thwarted, it. How deeply he felt the disastrous results of the expedition is shown by the fact that for a time his mind was deranged in consequence of it. And who will now deny that Paterson was right in calling the Isthmus of Panama the ’door of the seas and the key of the universe’? In 1825 Humboldt recommended the scheme of a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the enterprise of Lesseps will yet be carried to a successful issue.