Among his favourite 18th and 19th century Scottish poets and prosaists are Colin MacClaurin (1698-1746), David Hume (1711-1776), Adam Smith (1723-1790), James Hutton (1726-1797), Joseph Black (1728-1799), James Watt (1736-1819), Robert Burns (1759-1796), Walter Scott (1771-1832), Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), William Thomson, Kelvin (1824-1907), James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Of deep influence in his early years was the fruit of the creation of Colin Macfarquhar, Bell, and others—the Encyclopaedia Britannica.