BELL, ANDREW

born March 27, 1753, St. Andrews, Fife, Scot. died Jan. 27, 1832, Cheltenham, Eng. Scottish clergyman who developed popular education by the method of supervised mutual teaching among students. Bell graduated from St. Andrews and went as a tutor to Virginia, where he made a small fortune growing tobacco. After ordination in the Church of England, he went to Madras, where he introduced into an orphan school a "monitorial" plan that overcame shortage of teachers by having the better pupils instruct the slower ones. On his return to London in 1797 he published An Experiment in Education, which explained his system, but his ideas had little popularity in England until they were adapted by Joseph Lancaster in a school opened at Southwark in 1801 and by Robert Owen in New Lanark. Meanwhile, Bell was made rector of Swanage, Dorset, in 1801. In 1811 he became superintendent of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, a society formed to put his ideas into effect. He was master of Sherburn Hospital, Durham (1809), canon of Hereford Cathedral (1818), and prebend of Westminster (1819). At his death he left a large endowment for Scottish educational schemes. born 1726, Edinburgh, Scot. died May 10, 1809, Edinburgh Scottish engraver, and cofounder, with the printer Colin Macfarquhar, of the Encyclopdia Britannica. Bell was born in Edinburgh and lived there all his life. He began work humbly by "engraving letters, names, and crests on gentlemen's plate, dog's collars and so forth." He was never greatly admired as an engraver, and many of his plates for the first, second, and third editions of the Britannica, and for William Smellie's translation of the Count de Buffon's Natural History (1781 et seq.), are more highly regarded today than in his own time. How the arrangement between Bell and Macfarquhar to produce an encyclopaedia was made is not known; but it was Bell who wrote to William Smellie to engage his services as compiler of the first edition (1768-71), and his interest in the publication never flagged. He shared proprietorship with Macfarquhar, and in 1793, after Macfarquhar's death, he became sole proprietor.