793 



WOLLASTON, WILLIAM. 



WOLLASTON, WILLIAM HYDE, M.D. 



791 



another. "His cousin of Shenton was used to employ persons 

 privately, to observe our author's behaviour, who little suspected any 

 such matter. And las behaviour was found to be such, that the 

 stricter the observations were upon it, the more they turned to his 

 advantage. In fine, Mr. Wollaston became so thoroughly satisfied of 

 our author's merit, that he revoked the before-mentioned settlement 

 and made a will in hia favour." (Clarke's ' Life,' p. xi.) 



Wollaston now went to reside in London, and on the 26th of Novem- 

 ber, 1689, married a daughter of Mr. Nicholas Charlton, a citizen of 

 London, who brought him another accession of fortune. He now 

 devoted himself entirely to the enjoyment of domestic happiness and 

 the pursuit of learning. " He may most truly be said," observes his 

 biographer, " to have settled in London, for he very seldom went out 

 of it. He took no delight in unnecessary journeys, and for above 

 thirty years before his death had not been absent from his habitation 

 in Charterhouse-square so much as one whole night." (p. xiv.) His 

 studies were principally directed to the ancient languages, and morals 

 and theology, aud embraced mathematics and natural philosophy, and 

 the Arabic language. In 1690 he published a paraphrase of a part of 

 the ' Book of Ecclesiastes,' and in 1703 he composed and printed, but 

 only for private circulation, a small Latin grammar. The ' Religion 

 of Nature Delineated' was published in 1724, but a very short time 

 before his death. A number of other works, which he had written 

 during his four-and-thirty years' studious residence in London, were 

 committed by him to the flames a short time before his death. The 

 following is a list of manuscripts which were found after his death, 

 and which his biographer supposes escaped the same fate only by 

 their being forgotten : 1, A Hebrew Grammar ; 2, ' Tyrocinia Arabica 

 et Syriaca ;' 3, ' Specimen Vocabularii Biblio-Hebraici, literis nostra- 

 tibus quantum fert Liuguarum Dissonantia descripti;' 4, 'Formulas 

 quaedam Gemarinse ; ' 5, ' De Generibus Pedum, Metrorum, Carminum, 

 &c. apud Judaeos, Grsecos, et Latinos ;' 6, ' De Vocum Tonis Monitio 

 ad Tyrones ; ' 7, ' liudimeuta ad Mathesin et Philosophiam spectantia ;' 

 8, 'Miscellanea Philologica ; ' 9, 'Opinions of the Ancient Philoso- 

 phers ;' 10, , 'lovSa'iKa, sive Religionis et Literaturae Judaicae Synopsis;' 

 11, ' A Collection of some Antiquities and Particulars in the History 

 of Mankind, tending to show that Men have not been here upon this 

 Earth from Eternity,' &c.; 12, ' Some Passages relating to the History 

 of Christ, collected out of the Primitive Fathers;' 13, 'A Treatise 

 relating to the Jew?, of their Antiquities, Language, &c.' Besides 

 these there was a numerous collection of sermons found. From the 

 titles it may be supposed that many of these manuscript works were 

 composed to assist his own studies. " What renders it the more pro- 

 bable," says Dr, Clarke, " or indeed almost beyond doubt, that he 

 would have destroyed these likewise if he had remembered them, is 

 that several of those which remain undestroyed are only rudiments or 

 rougher sketches of what he afterwards reconsidered and carried on 

 much farther, and which soon after such revisal he nevertheless com- 

 mitted to the flames, as being still, in his opinion, short of that perfec- 

 tion to which he desired and had intended to bring them." (p. xxiii.) 



Wollaston died on the 29th of October 1724, in his sixty-sixth year. 

 The immediate cause of his death was a fracture of the arm, which 

 happened when he was in a bad state of health. His wife had died 

 four years before. They had lived most happily together for thirty 

 years, and she had borne him eleven children, of whom seven survived 

 their father, He was buried by the side of his wife in the church of 

 Great Finborough in Suffolk, where one of his estates lay, and where 

 his eldest son afterwards resided. 



' The Religion of Nature Delineated ' is, as the name implies, an 

 exposition of man's various moral duties and the principles of them, 

 independently of revelation, and of so much as may be learnt without 

 revelation of the divine government of the world. The chief pecu- 

 liarity of Wollaston's system of morals is that he refers all duties to 

 truth as their fundamental principle, defining truth to be the expres- 

 sion of things as they are, and extending the definition by the remark 

 that " a true proposition may be denied, or things may be denied to 

 be what they are by deeds as well as by express words, or another 

 proposition." As an instance, theft would be interpreted by Wollaston 

 as a denial of the true owner's property in the goods stolen. On this 

 somewhat fanciful foundation the whole range of human duties, with 

 the exception of course of those arising out of revealed religion, is 

 built up by Wollaston with great ingenuity and skill. The work is 

 not complete : the author sets out with proposing to himself three 

 questions to be answered: 1, "Is there really any such thing as 

 natural religion, properly and truly so called ?" 2, " If there is, what 

 is it?" and, 3, "How may a man qualify himself, so as to be able to 

 judge for himself, of the other religions professed in the world ; to 

 settle his own opinions in disputable matters ; and then to enjoy 

 tranquillity of mind, neither disturbing others, nor being disturbed at 

 what passes among them ?" Only the first two of these questions are 

 answered. Wollaston had begun to answer the third question, but 

 had made little progress, when death overtook him. 



The work was very popular on its first publication ; ten thousand 

 copies of it, according to Dr. Clarke, having been sold in a very few 

 years. The best edition is the seventh and last, to which is prefixed 

 the biographical sketch, by Dr. Clarke, whence this account has been 

 principally derived, and which was edited by him at the request, as he 

 states in an advertisement, of Caroline, the wife of George II. 



WOLLASTON, WILLIAM HYDE, M.D., F.R.S,, a distinguished 

 cultivator of natural science, was bora August 6th, 1776. He was the 

 third son of the Rev. Francis Wollaston, F.R.S., of Chiselhurst in Kent, 

 and rector of St. Vedast, Foster-lane, in the city of London, who waa 

 himself the grandson of the author of the 'Religion of Nature Deli- 

 neated,' the subject of the preceding article. A peculiar taste for intel- 

 lectual pursuits of the more exact kind appears to have been hereditary 

 in his family. He was an astronomer, aud published, in 1789, a 'Speci- 

 men of a General Astronomical Catalogue, arranged in Zones of North 

 Polar Distance, and adapted to January 1, 1790.' He also produced, 

 from his own observations, an extensive catalogue of the northern 

 circumpolar stars, which, with an account of the instruments employed, 

 tables for the reductions, and some miscellaneous papers, was pub- 

 lished under the title of 'Fasciculus Astronomicus,' in 1800. His 

 eldest son, the Rev. Archdeacon Francis John Hyde Wollaston, B.D., 

 F.R.S., was also a man of science, and constructed a thormome- 

 trical barometer for measuring heights, on which he communicated 

 two papers to the 'Philosophical Transactions,' in the years 1817 

 and 1820. 



W. H. Wollaston having gone through the usual preparatory course 

 of education, was sent to Caius College, Cambridge, where he applied 

 himself diligently to the studies immediately relating to the medical 

 profession, for which he was intended, and where he took the degree 

 of Doctor in Medicine in 1793 : in the same year he was elected a 

 Fellow of the Royal Society, to whose ' Philosophical Transactions,' 

 during his life, he communicated many papers of the highest import- 

 ance, and in 1806 he was chosen one of its secretaries, an office which 

 he retained for some years. On the decease of Sir Joseph Banks, in 

 1820, he was appointed president of the society until the anniversary 

 election of that year. He was for many years a member of the Board 

 of Longitude, and remained such until its improvident abolition by the 

 government shortly prior to his decease ; and he had been an early 

 member and office-bearer of the Geological Society. 



After premonitory symptoms of paralysis for many months, he died 

 of an effusion of blood in the ventricles of the brain, on the 22nd of 

 December 1828. 



Dr. Wollaston had entered into practice as a physician, and for a 

 time resided at Bury St. Edmunds : he afterwards removed to London, 

 and it might have been supposed that in this city his talents would 

 procure for him an extensive reputation ; but either because his 

 success was not equal to his expectations, or in consequence of the 

 disappointment which he felt in not obtaining the post of physician to 

 St. George's Hospital, Dr. Pemberton having been on this occasion 

 preferred to him, he determined to quit the profession, and to devote 

 himself wholly to the pursuit of science. It is possible that the 

 effects of another cause may have contributed to this determination, 

 either in his own mind or in the minds of his friends. The pecu- 

 liarities of temper and deportment in a distinguished member of the 

 healing art [ABERNETHY, JOHN], as exhibited to his patients, have 

 already been noticed. It was long ago remarked in conversation, by 

 an experimental philosopher of great eminence, and a junior contem- 

 porary of Dr. Wollaston, that in the practice of medicine, he would, 

 from some of his own characteristics, have been "still more disagree- 

 able than Abernethy." 



The researches of men of science, however important they may have 

 been to mankind by the improvements to which they have led in the 

 arts and manufactures, have seldom been productive of immediate 

 benefit to those who first conducted them : some more fortunate 

 person, by seizing on an original idea already propounded, and bring- 

 ing it down to the level of a practical application, has thereby acquired 

 both fame and fortune ; while the original discoverer has remained 

 unnoticed, and perhaps even his name has been forgotten. This was 

 not the fate of Dr. Wollaston, in whom were combined the genius of 

 the philosopher and the skill of the artist ; since from his different 

 discoveries, and particularly from his method of manufacturing plati- 

 num, he acquired a considerable fortune. No one however could have 

 better deserved the rewards due to genius and industry ; for not only 

 were the qualities of his mind of a high order, but his application to 

 philosophical investigations and experiments was unremitting : even 

 when near his last moments, though suffering iiuder a painful malady, 

 he had the fortitude to dictate an account of some of his most im- 

 portant unpublished researches, in the benevolent hope that a know- 

 ledge of them might thus be preserved for the benefit of mankind. 



Among the papers so produced, was ' The Bakerian Lecture. On a 

 method of rendering Platina malleable,' which appears in the ' Philoso- 

 phical Transactions' for 1829. With the exception of one requisite 

 precaution, slightly mentioned in his paper ' On a new metal [Rho- 

 dium] found in crude Platina,' communicated to the Royal Society, 

 and published in the same work (a quarter of a century before, being 

 the first in which he treated of platinum and the metals which accom- 

 any it,) no account of the process he employed in the manufacture of 

 that metal had hitherto been made public. In the Bakerian lecture it 

 is described with the perspicuous brevity always characteristic of ^his 

 style, but so as to enable any competent person to put it in practice. 

 It consists, essentially, in the first place, in the treatment of the crude 

 metal, often termed the ore of platinum, in aqua regia of a certain 

 strength, and the precipitation of that metal from the resulting solution 

 by sal-ammoniac, a process long well-known, the careful washing ot 



