WOLLASTON, FRANCIS

(b. London, England, 23 November 1731; d. Chislehurst, kent, England, 31 October 1815)

astronomy.

Wollaston was the eldest son of Mary Fauquier and Francis Wollaston. With his brother Charlton, he matriculated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in June 1748. He graduated LL.B. in 1754. With the intention of practicing law, he entered Lincoln’s Inn on 24 November 1750, but he soon decided to enter the church, and was ordained deacon in 1754 and priest in 1755. In 1758 Simon Fanshawe presented him to the living of Dengie, in Essex, and in the same year he married Althea Hyde, by whom he had the daughters and seven sons, one of whom was William Hyde Wollaston. In 1761 he became rector of East Dereham, in Norfolk (where his father had a summer residence). In 1769 he was made rector of Chislehurst in Kent and elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Other ecclesiastical benefices followed, but he continued to live at Chislehurst. His wife died there in 1798.

Wollaston’s first book, Address to the Clergy of the Church of England in Particular and to All Christians in General Proposing an Application for Relief, etc., was offered in support of a parliamentary bill of 1772, proposing to remove the obligation placed on members of the universities to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of religion, and to replace it with a simple declaration of faith in the scriptures. The obligation had been established by the Ecclesiastical Commission of 1562, which agreed on the articles, Wollaston’s support was of no avail and the university tests were not abolished until 1871. Two other books written during the next two years with a view to mild reform of the church seem likewise to have been little noticed, but not to have stood in the way of preferment.

Wollaston’s serious interest in astronomy was, as he explained, calculated to remove him to a “distance from the misrepresentations of narrow-minded bigots.”¹ At Chislehurst he had a private observatory built at the top of a square brick house. Here he used a telescope with a triple object-glass, made for him in 1771 by Peter Dollond. The telescope passed to his son, and thence to the Royal Astronomical Society. With the Dollond telescope Wollaston saw and described the great spot and belts of Jupiter, although he recorded no colors (1772). He equipped his observatory with a thermometer and barometer, and presented papers to the Royal Society on the variation in the rate of his astronomical clock with corresponding atmospheric conditions. He was not able to correlate these quantities in any significant way.

Wollaston long entertained the hope that astronomers might collaborate on a general plan for improving star catalogues and drafting them in a way that would facilitate the measurement of small stellar movements. In 1789 he published a very substantial collection of comparative catalogues with a preface announcing his plan and discussing the many previous catalogues on which he based his coordinates, which were reduced to 1 January 1790. As an essay in history, what he wrote was not altogether reliable, as S. P. Rigaud pointed out in connection with Wollaston’s remarks on Bradley.² His catalogue was much used by William Herschel.³

Wollaston produced a number of ideas for new instruments, but he tended to make exaggerated claims for them, and none was of any great moment. He saw the merits of the transit circle, having worked with a small one (fourteen-inch focal length) from before 1772, but tried in vain to persuade first Jesse Ramsden and then Edward Troughton to make a larger one to his design. Finally, in 1781, William Cary began work, according to Wollaston’s plan, on an altazimuth instrument (for the method of equal altitudes). Another instrument of his was a “universal meridian dial,” for any latitude, on he which wrote a pamphlet; but in doing so he added little to the art of dialing, Wollaston’s most important contribution to astronomy was not made at a fundamental level, but was rather his publication of two or three useful practical aids to the ordinary astronomer and navigator, one of which was the comparative catalogue already mentioned. The second was a catalogue of circumpolar stars (1800), made with his transit instrument, by way of practicing what he had preached in his first book of 1789. The instrument is described at the end of the catalogue, together with explanations of the tables and formulas for calculating from them. His third important contribution, a collection of the plates depicting the heavens “as they appear to the naked eye,” was published by John Cary Sr., whose firm was renowned for its maps, atlases, and globes.

Although the date of birth given above is that which Wollaston himself gives in his autobiography, he makes a curious remark on the second page of his Fasciculus astronomicus of 1800, to the effect that the observations it embodies were made with “the eye of an old man, turned threescore before he engaged in the work.”

NOTES

1.The Secret History al’ of a Private Man, p. 54.

2.Miscellaneous Works of James Bradley (Oxford, 1832), p. 59.

3. J. L. E. Dreyer, ed., scientific Papers of sir William Herschel (London, 1912), p. 40.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wollaston’s chief works are A Specimen of a General Astronomical Catalogue, Arranged in Zones of North Polar Distance . . . (London, 1789); Directions for Making an Universal Meridian Dial Capable of Being Set to Any Latitude, Which Shall Give the Mean-Solar Time of Noon, by Inspection, Without any Calculation Whatsoever(London, 1793); Fasciculus astronomicus, Containing Observations of the Northern Circumpolar Region; Together With Some Account of the Instrument With Which They Were Made . . . (London, 1800); A Portraiture of the Heavens as They Appear to the Naked Eye (London, 1811).

References to papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society will be found in the printed books. In 1795 Wollaston printed privately for his friends a short autobiography written in the third person, The Secret History of a Private Man, Which is rare. It contains an interesting account of the way in which his proposed reforms of 1772 were received in different quarters and is largely a justification of his behavior as a minister of the English church. There are letters from him in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 32887, f. 501; 32888, f. 198; 32892, f. 155; 32896, f. 360; 32902. f. 330). A combined entry on Francis and his youngest brother, George, written by E. I. Carlyle, is in Dictionary of National Biography. There are references to genealogies of the family in the DNB entry on William Wollaston.

J. D. North