76 MR. F. D. PALMER ON OLD-TIME YARMOUTH NATURALISTS. 
even dangerously ill ; and, for the last ten years, he was heavily 
overworked in anxious and unsuccessful business. But, even in all 
these times of sadness, the study of nature and of art brought such 
contrast in the events of his life that it could make him happy, and 
could mitigate many sorrows that might else have seemed intolerable. 
Charles Stuart Girdlestone (a friend of the Pagets) was the 
only son of the locally-famed M.D., Thomas Girdlestone, who lived 
in one of the houses recently pulled down to enlarge Bacon and Co.’s 
Brewery, fronting the North Quay, at the north-west of Say’s 
Corner. In early life the doctor had served in the army under 
Colonel Sir Charles Stuart, and he appears to have named his 
son after him. He was the author of several works of a classical 
and antiquarian character. The son’s life was but a short one, as 
he died in 1831, aged 33, unmarried, when the large collection of 
birds which he mostly shot with his own gun in the neighbourhood 
of Yarmouth was dispersed ; the record of his “ Game Bag from 
1820 — 29” is in the possession of Mr. T. M. Baker, Town Clerk 
of Great Yarmouth. 
Dawson Turner was born in 1775, at No. 40 Middlegate 
Street, while his mother was paying a visit at the house of her 
husband’s uncle. He received the earliest rudiments of education 
at the North Walsham Grammar School, then conducted by the 
Eev. Joseph Hepworth, whence he was removed to Barton, and 
placed under the private tuition of the Eev. Eobert Forby. In 
1793 he was entered at Pembroke College, of which his uncle, 
the Eev. Joseph Turner, Dean of Norwich, was master; but, in 
consequence of the death of his father in the following year, he 
was compelled to leave the University (where he subsequently 
took the degree of M.A.), and apply himself to the less congenial 
occupation of banking. The charms of literature were, however, 
irresistible, and during a long life Mr. Turner devoted every minute 
that could be spared from business, with insatiable ardour, to the 
pursuit of his favourite studies, among which the first was botany. 
In 1797 he was elected a Fellow of the Linmean Society; in 
1802 he published £ A Synopsis of the British Fuci ’ ; in 1801 
‘ Muscologies Herbernicce Spicilegium ’ ; in 1805 ‘The Botanists’ 
Guide through England and Wales’; and, in 1808, ‘ Historia 
Fucorum,’ a splendid work, in four quarto volumes, with coloured 
