Jolm Chalmers Morton. 
G91 
re-writing of these books, so as to bring tliem up to date of 
publication; and they were issued in 1887 in one volume, under 
the title of " The Cattle, Sheep, and Pigs of Great Britain." 
He was an influential member of the Council of the Yorkshire 
Agricultural Society, and was for veiy many years a Member of 
the Farmers' Club, at whose meetings he was a familiar figure. 
Earl Cathcart sums up admirably the personal characteristics 
of Mr. Coleman in words which I am permitted to quote, and 
which may fitly close this brief sketch of a busy and useful life :- — 
" I have been associated with Mr. Coleman during many 
years, in many places, and late and early ; in the drawing-room 
of the country house, in the common room of the busy inn, in 
the trial field, in the cx-owded show-yard ; and always, and at all 
times, found him the same modest, self-possessed, agTeeable, 
energetic, well-informed man." 
John Chalmers Morton 
was born on July 11, 1821, and was the son of Mr. John Morton, 
agent for upwards of fifty years to the Earls of Ducie upon their 
Gloucestershire estate. He derived his second Christian name 
from his mother, who was a sister of the famous Scottish divine. 
Dr. Chalmers ; and he was educated at the Merchiston Castle 
School, Edinburgh, where one of his uncles was head master. 
During the last years of his stay at Merchiston, he attended 
certain of the University lectures — on chemistry, physics, natural 
history, and agriculture. In some I'eminiscences of his school 
life which he wrote in 1879 for the school magazine, he refers 
to the fact that " his subsequent life was shaped mainly by the 
circumstances which made him a student in the agricultural 
class-room of the University, under the late Professor Low." 
Before he was nineteen he was summoned home to take charge, 
under his father, of the Whitfield Model Farm on Lord Ducie's 
estate. While here he was enrolled as a member of the English 
Agricultural Society — then recently started — on the 4th Sep- 
tember, 1839. He was thus what may be called a " foundation " 
member of the Koyal Agricultural Society of England when it 
received its Charter on March 26, 1840. In the new pride of 
membership, he went to the historic first Country Meeting of 
the Society at Oxford in 1839 ; and it was one of his boasts that 
he had been to almost every Royal Show since.' The present 
' In his memoir of Sir Brandreth Gibbs in the Journal for ] 885, Mr. Morton 
refers to the fact that he himself had attended ever}' Show except those held 
in 1840, 1842, 1848, and 1854 (Vol. XXI. p. 612). 
T Y 2 
