Ixiii 



as an employer of labour, as a successful man of business, as a promoter 

 of knowledge, as a friend to education among all classes, as a neighbour, a 

 parent^ or a friend, we may safely say that his place in society will not easily 

 be filled." 



John, Lord Wrottesley, was born on the 5th of August 1798. His 

 father, the first peer, was the representative of a family which was of dis- 

 tinction when it acquired the estate of Wrottesley, near Wolverhampton, 

 at a date which may be best remembered by the fact that the fourth pos- 

 sessor, and the third who took his name from it, was made a Knight of the 

 Garter at the institution of the order. The subject of our memoir gra- 

 duated at Oxford with a first class in mathematics, and was called to the 

 bar, at which he practised for several years as an equity lawyer. His 

 tastes were scientific. He showed them when he joined the Society 

 for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, in the Committee of which he 

 worked during the whole existence of the body : in its earliest days he 

 wrote a number of the Useful Knowledge Library, on navigation. In 

 1831 he became one of the Secretaries of the Astronomical Society, of 

 which he was afterwards President (1841-43). He became President of 

 the Royal Society in 1854, on the retirement of Lord Rosse, and held this 

 post until 1858. He died Oct. 27, 1867, aged sixty-nine. No life was 

 more devoid of striking incidents than his : the only exceptions to its even 

 tenour were the loss of two worthy sons, one of whom fell in action at the 

 Cape, the other at Bomarsund. 



His characteristics, says a journal obituary, were plain manners^ kind feel- 

 ings, sound judgment, and useful intellect. His knowledge of law, his pursuit 

 of science, and his conduct of life were equally practical and equally unob- 

 trusive. His particular pursuit was astronomy, which he carried on in two 

 small observatories, one at Blackheath, v/hile he was engaged at the bar, the 

 other at Wrottesley, after his accession to the title in 1841. In 1839 he 

 received the gold medal of the Astronomical Society for a catalogue of 

 stars. This work was performed by himself with the aid of Mr. Hartnup, 

 now at the head of the Liverpool Observatory, whom he trained as his 

 assistant. The object of it was to make systematic observations of the 

 right ascensions of all the stars of the Astronomical Society's Catalogue, 

 of the sixth and seventh magnitudes ; the higher magnitudes having been 

 undertaken, or rather having been supposed to have been undertaken, by 

 other observatories. Comparison with various cases obtained from public 

 observatories showed that Mr. Wrottesley's catalogue was, as it was styled 

 by Mr. Baily in delivering the medal, of first-rate importance and entitled 

 to implicit confidence. 



Lord Wrottesley also communicated two astronomical papers to the 

 Royal Society — one, " On the Results of Periodical Observations of the 

 Positions and Distances of certain Double Stars," published in the Philo- 

 sophical Transactions for 1851 ; the other, which was published in the 



