was loved and respected by all." Is it not plain that the temperance and
moderation descended in the blood of the Burnetts?

Thomas Burnett of Kemnay, grandson of Craigmyle, is known in a sphere
where few Scotsmen had entered. He was a courtier of that remarkable
little court of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, where he became the
friend of the philosopher Leibnitz, correspondent of the poet Dryden,
and his letters are full of curious gossip on the most various
subjects--theology, philosophy, literature, including poetry and the
small talk of the day. He was greatly employed and trusted by the
Electress Sophia. His son George was noted as an agriculturist, and his
grandson, Alexander Burnett of Kemnay (by a daughter of Sir Alexander
Burnett of Leys), was long British Secretary of embassy at Berlin, and
attended Frederick the Great in the campaigns of the Seven Years' War;
remaining at the Prussian Court as Chargé d'Affaires after Sir Andrew
Mitchell's death.

James, third son of Craigmyle the Covenanter, married a daughter of the
family of Irvine of Monboddo, a scion of the house of Drum, and having
so acquired that barony, he transmitted it to his descendants, of whom
the most famous was his great-grandson, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a
Judge of the Court of Session, an eminent lawyer, and a man of rare
accomplishments, with some whimsical peculiarities. In a treatise on the
origin and progress of language, he was the first seriously to assert
the descent of mankind from the monkey, and that the human race were
originally furnished with tails! That and a hundred other whimsies were
mixed up with a great deal of learning then very rare, and with a
philosophy that dealt in free and daring speculation, of which the world
was not yet worthy.