53 



V. — A Short Account of the Life and Writings of the late 

 Mr. William Sturgeon. 



By J. P. Joule, V.P., F.R.S., Hon. Mem. Phil. Soc. 

 Cambridge, Corr. Mem. R.A. Turin, &c. 



[Read October 7 th, IR06.] 



A pardonable vanity of our human nature makes us seek 

 into the past, in order to connect the names of those we 

 respect and love, with the great and good of ancient times. 

 In so doing we award to our contemporaries a portion of the 

 praise and admiration which are due to their eminent fore- 

 fathers. But the search is often unprofitable, and many of 

 our greatest men, descended from an obscure or unknown 

 parentage, have been the first to render the family name 

 illustrious. Of such was the subject of the present memoir, 

 who was born in 1783, at Whittington, a village in the 

 county of Lancaster, near the border which divides it from 

 Westmoreland. His father was John Sturgeon, a shoemaker, 

 who came from the neighbourhood of Dumfries, and married 

 Betsy Adcock, daughter of a small shopkeeper in Whit- 

 tington. The offspring of this marriage were William, 

 Margaret, and Mary. Of these, Mary died in infancy ; and 

 Margaret married John Coates, and died the mother of a 

 numerous family.* 



John Sturgeon appears to have been a man who paid more 

 attention to fishing for salmon in the river Lune, a pursuit in 



" The youngest of these, Ellen, who was only a few weeks old at the time 

 of her mother's death, was on that event kindly taken into the family of her 

 uncle, William Sturgeon, and ever afterwards treated as his own daughter. 



