18 NATURAL HISTORY 



From Jan. 

 From Jan. 

 From Jan. 

 From Jan. 

 [From Jan. 



Inch. HIUI.I. 



,1783, to Jan. 1,1784 ...... 33 71 



,1784, to Jan. 1, 1785 33 80 



,1785, to Jan. 1,1786 .... . . 31 55 



, 1786, to Jan. 1, 1787 ....-.,. 39 57 



, 1787, to Jan. 1, 1788 36 24 



be ascertained till a person has measured it for a very long period. " If 

 I had only measured the rain," says he, " for the four first years, from 

 1740 to 1743, 1 should have said the mean rain at Lyndon was 16$ inches 

 for the year; if from 1740 to 1750, 18$ inches. The mean rain before 

 1763 was 20$ ; from 1763 and since, 25$; from 1770 to 1780, 26. If only 

 1773, 1774, and 1775, had been measured, Lyndon mean rain would have 

 been called 32 inches." 



[It is probable that the extension of his observations over thirteen 

 years might have induced Gilbert White to have drawn some deductions 



His father, Samuel Barker, a profound Hebrew scholar and Greek 

 critic, known by his Poesis Vetus Hebraica Restituta, was married to a 

 daughter of the able and pious, but visionary and unorthodox, William 

 Whiston : and it was in the house of his child at Lyndon, at the advanced 

 age of eighty-five, that that energetic but wild spirit ceased to be active. 

 In such parentage we probably see the germs of many of Thomas Barker's 

 speculations : they were partly mathematical, partly critical, and partly 

 theological. His observations chiefly relate to natural history and meteor- 

 ology. Incited, perhaps, to the prosecution of the former by his connexion 

 with the family of Gilbert White, a connexion originally commercial 

 through the intervention of his maternal uncle, who was long in partner- 

 ship with Benjamin White, and subsequently cemented by his marriage 

 with a sister of our author, to the latter he must have been actuated 

 by a strong impulse, operating on him throughout the greater part of 

 a prolonged life. The tables of his Meteorological Observations made 

 at Lyndon, for a continuous series of fifty-eight years, (a duration 

 probably not exceeded by any single observer,) were published in succes- 

 sive volumes of the Philosophical Transactions. His earliest contribution 

 to that store of valuable information which the world owes to the Royal 

 Society, related to an extraordinary meteor, seen in his native county, 

 which resembled a water-spout: this was communicated in 1749, during 

 the life of his grandfather. Fifty years later he was still a correspondent 

 of that Society, but not a Fellow of it. In not seeking to become a 

 member of it, he may have been influenced by the recollection that his 

 grandfather was refused admission into it ; but Whiston does not appear 

 to have felt any resentment towards the Society in consequence. He 

 imputed the withdrawal of his name after proposal solely to Sir Isaac 

 Newton, whom he reports to have said, that if Whiston were elected a 

 member, he would no longer be president. The extreme notoriety of 

 Whiston's theological aberrations is fully sufficient to account for the 

 opposition to him: he himself, somewhat captiously attributes it to his 

 refusing to yield to Sir Isaac, then far advanced in years, that implicit 

 deference which was usually paid to him by others. 

 Mr. Barker died in 1803, in the eighty-eighth year of his age. E. T. B. 



