216 FOTHERGILL'S SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS CHAP. 



Fothergill had a strong belief in the use of pictures. 

 Of views and portraits he had many. He purchased for 

 eighty guineas the noble collection of John Nickolls, 

 F.R.S., the young Hertford Quaker, and the " first 

 regular collector of English Heads." These portraits 

 were bound in ten large volumes and formed the original 

 of Ames' Catalogue. 1 Not content with acquiring the 

 pictures of others, Fothergill employed artists, as already 

 mentioned, to draw for himself, and by this means objects 

 of nature, too large or too perishable for his museum, 

 were preserved in their beauty of form and colour. 



Reviewing Fothergill' s scientific interests, one cannot 

 but note his pure delight from his boyhood in all living 

 things. It was a saying of Mohammed that if a man 

 finds himself with bread in both hands, he should exchange 

 one loaf for some flowers of the narcissus, since the bread 

 feeds the body, but the flowers feed the soul. Fothergill 

 had an eye for the beautiful in nature if not in art. He 

 loved the coral and the shell, bright with the hues of tropic 

 sunshine, and the insect perfected in all its parts so that 

 it may live its day of life. Not less he prized the age- 

 long record of fin or fern written in fossil stone. But 

 most of all he loved the plants of the vegetable world : 

 sowing the seed, that he might watch the upspringing of 

 the young green shoot, the beauty of its developed form, 

 and all the glory of flower and fruit. And so he made 

 the climes of many lands to blossom under his eye ; the 



a drier stratum of air near the earth, and that the drops increase by amalgama- 

 tion between those of equal size. Works, iii. xxxiii, 149 ; and information 

 kindly furnished by R. Corless, M.A. Fothergill also contrived a method of 

 generating and preserving ice in the West Indies. Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ix. 737 ; 

 Gent. Mag., 1781, 165. 



1 They were sold later for 200 guineas to Mr. Thane. Nichols, op. cit. 

 ix. 740. Nickolls also possessed and published Milton's collection of Letters 

 addressed by Ireton, Vane and others to Cromwell, which he had derived 

 from Ell wood through J. Wyeth : the originals are now in the library of the 

 Society of Antiquaries. Foth., Works, iii. p. liv note. A series of prints and 

 drawings, once in Fothergill's possession, was sold at Sotheby's, Aug. 1913, 

 having been used with others by R. M. T. Chiswell, to extra-illustrate Pennant's 

 Tour in Wales, extending this work to eleven volumes. They were bought 

 for NewYork at the price of 350. The late eminent Sir Jonathan Hutchinson 

 set a like high value on pictorial means : it would not be difficult to trace 

 iu his career other parallels with that of Fothergill. The writer had Sir J. 

 Hutchinson's encouragement in commencing the present work ; it can now 

 only be linked with his memory. 



