Academic literature on the topic 'John Wollaston'

On 23 February 1984, the bishops of the Anglican Province of Western Australia signed and sealed a document promulgating the Venerable John Ramsden Wollaston a local saint and hero of the Anglican Communion in accordance with Resolutions 77–80 of the Lambeth Conference 1958. These four resolutions had allowed national or provincial Anglican Churches to add to the Calendar of the Saints to permit ‘supplementary commemorations for local use’ according to the following principles where they were extra-scriptural persons. They had to be individuals ‘whose historical character and devotion are beyond doubt’; ‘revisions should be few and without controversy’; and such additions ‘should normally result from a wide-spread desire expressed in the region concerned over a reasonable period of time’.

Malta, an island in the central Mediterranean Sea, was fortified as a base for the Knights Hospitaller 1530–1798 and to provide major harbours for the British Royal Navy after 1813. Men with British military associations (all subsequently to attain some distinction in public and/or academic life) were amongst the many pioneers of Maltese geology who established the essence of its outcrop stratigraphy and structure: a circa 300-metre-thick sequence of near-horizontal mid-Cenozoic fossiliferous limestones punctuated by a ‘blue clay/marl’, cut by a series of major faults and penetrated by several caves and fissures whose infill contained significant remains of Pleistocene vertebrates. Between 1843 and 1856, Lieutenant (later Vice-Admiral) Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt (1811–1888) defined major units in the bedrock sequence, Colonel (later Major-General) Sir William Reid (1791–1858) promoted publication of a geological memoir, and a 1:31,680-scale geological map prepared by the 3rd Earl of Ducie on a Royal Engineers topographical base map was published under Royal Engineer auspices. Mostly between 1860 and 1866, Captain (later Professor) Frederick Wollaston Hutton (1836–1905) and Surgeon (later Deputy Surgeon-General and Professor) Andrew Leith Adams (1827–1882) made field observations that refined earlier interpretations of stratigraphy and structure and generated revised but small-scale maps. They also collected specimens that facilitated specialist identifications of Malta’s fossil faunas, including foraminifera by Thomas Rupert Jones (1819–1911), Professor of Geology at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Rock specimens were sent in 1888 by Surgeon-Captain David (later Surgeon-General Sir David) Bruce (1855–1931) and the former engineer Lieutenant (and later Professor) Osbert Chadwick (1844–1913) to the pioneer oceanographer John (later Sir John) Murray (1841–1914). They stimulated Murray’s benchmark study 1889–1890 of Malta’s sedimentary sequence and fossil foraminifera, and their palaeoenvironmental interpretation, plus his compilation of a 1:129,254-scale geological map. These prompted extensive local studies and collection of macrofossil specimens by schoolmaster (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John Henry Cooke (1862–1933). By the end of the century, representative Maltese fossils had been presented for specialist study and identification or description to major museums in England, Scotland and Italy, facilitating improved correlation of Maltese strata with Oligo-Miocene successions elsewhere.

AbstractIn 1992 Sheffield Academic Press will publish a selection of the papers given at this Conference, which was held in Newcastle in July 1991. The Conference was organized by the Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University. The Head of the Department at the time was Professor John Sawyer. The publication will be edited by the new Head of the Department, Jon Davies, and by Isabel Wollaston, currently a British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford. Two of our students-Carol Charlton and Michael Burke-worked extra hours to make sure the organisation functioned. Our thanks are due to them and to all participants. This article is in part a summary of the Conference and of those papers which will appear in the book. It is also a contribution in its own right to an understanding of the relationships between the social sciences [sociology and anthropology] and theology. Several cross-cutting social, personal and professional loyalties can, and often do create degrees of distance, dispute and misunderstanding between the two disciplines. As it happens, this Conference managed to find a respectable acreage of common ground; but it is perhaps useful to mention some of the possible areas of controversy, if only because any future conference will probably have to deal with them more directly than we chose to! Readers will of course realise that the book is still being prepared and that the papers discussed here may well be altered or added to. The premise of this article is that all "TEXTS", be they sacred or secular, ancient or modem, canonical or provisional, are the products of human social transactions, a human context, with all that this means for the processes of text-creation and the business of conscious, purposeful, fallible, writing and editing. Texts and contexts change together; and change each other.

Janet Vida Watson was born on 1 September 1923, one of two sisters and the daughter of Professor D.M.S. Watson. Her father had succeeded to the chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College two years earlier. He had, at that time, already established himself as an international authority on vertebrate palaeontology. A career which was to be recognized in many ways including election to the Royal Society in 1922, the presentation of the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society in 1935 and the Wollaston Medal in 1965; sharing the latter awards ceremony with his daughter. Professor Watson stated that his great aim had been the discovery of the evolutionary courses followed by the vertebrates, and it is interesting to note that it was the same step from careful observation to the elucidation of history which intrigued and stimulated his daughter. The family lived in South Hampstead and Janet attended the local high school. Subsequently she went to Reading University where she took a General Science degree in 1943. Colleagues at that time recall Janet as a very clever student rather than being particularly hard working; she was a relatively quiet person with a few close friends. She had a keen interest in the arts, making, for example, regular trips to Sadler’s Wells ballet. At Reading Janet studied under Professor H.L. Hawkins a notable invertebrate palaeontologist and an influential teacher. Carrying with her a strong recommendation from Hawkins Janet went to Imperial College where she graduated with a first class honours in Geology in 1947. At this stage given her strong background in palaeontology it is probable Janet was considering a research career in the subject. However, at that time, H.H. Read was building a research team following the end of the war. Impressed by Janet’s performance in her honour’s exams - Read reportedly said she should have been given 120% to do justice to her relative performance - Read persuaded Janet to join him, the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

This thesis examines the transmission of Protestantism to Australia by the early British colonists and its consequences for their engagement with the land between 1788 and 1850. It explores the ways in which colonists gave religious meaning to their surrounds, particularly their use of exile and exodus narratives to describe journeying to the colony and their sense of their destination as a site of banishment, a wilderness or a Promised Land. The potency of these scriptural images for colonising Europeans has been recognised in North America and elsewhere: this study establishes and details their significance in early colonial Australia. This thesis also considers the ways in which colonists’ Protestant values mediated their engagement with their surrounds and informed their behaviour towards the land and its indigenous inhabitants. It demonstrates that leading Protestants asserted and acted upon their particular values for industry, order, mission and biblicism in ways that contributed to the transformation of Aboriginal land. From the physical changes wrought by industrious agricultural labour through to the spiritual transformations achieved by rites of consecration, their specifically Protestant values enabled Britons to inhabit the land on familiar material and cultural terms. The structural basis for this study is provided by thematic biographies of five prominent colonial Protestants: Richard Johnson, Samuel Marsden, William Grant Broughton, John Wollaston and John Dunmore Lang. The private and public writings of these men are examined in light of the wider literature on religion and colonialism and environmental history. By delineating the significance of Protestantism to individual colonists’ responses to the land, this thesis confirms the trend of much recent British and Australian historiography towards a more religious understanding of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its overarching argument is that Protestantism helped lay the foundation for colonial society by encouraging the transformation of the environment according to the colonists’ values and needs, and by providing ideological support for the British use and occupation of the territory. Prominent Protestants applied their religious ideas to Australia in ways that tended to assist, legitimate or even necessitate the colonisation of the land.

Doctor of Philosophy
This thesis examines the transmission of Protestantism to Australia by the early British colonists and its consequences for their engagement with the land between 1788 and 1850. It explores the ways in which colonists gave religious meaning to their surrounds, particularly their use of exile and exodus narratives to describe journeying to the colony and their sense of their destination as a site of banishment, a wilderness or a Promised Land. The potency of these scriptural images for colonising Europeans has been recognised in North America and elsewhere: this study establishes and details their significance in early colonial Australia. This thesis also considers the ways in which colonists’ Protestant values mediated their engagement with their surrounds and informed their behaviour towards the land and its indigenous inhabitants. It demonstrates that leading Protestants asserted and acted upon their particular values for industry, order, mission and biblicism in ways that contributed to the transformation of Aboriginal land. From the physical changes wrought by industrious agricultural labour through to the spiritual transformations achieved by rites of consecration, their specifically Protestant values enabled Britons to inhabit the land on familiar material and cultural terms. The structural basis for this study is provided by thematic biographies of five prominent colonial Protestants: Richard Johnson, Samuel Marsden, William Grant Broughton, John Wollaston and John Dunmore Lang. The private and public writings of these men are examined in light of the wider literature on religion and colonialism and environmental history. By delineating the significance of Protestantism to individual colonists’ responses to the land, this thesis confirms the trend of much recent British and Australian historiography towards a more religious understanding of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its overarching argument is that Protestantism helped lay the foundation for colonial society by encouraging the transformation of the environment according to the colonists’ values and needs, and by providing ideological support for the British use and occupation of the territory. Prominent Protestants applied their religious ideas to Australia in ways that tended to assist, legitimate or even necessitate the colonisation of the land.

This chapter studies a series of portraits of young women dressed for the masquerade, completed by English artist John Wollaston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Wollaston painted the sitters in historic costume appropriate for a public masked ball, no masquerades were held in the British North American colonies. Instead, these fictional portrayals allowed colonial women to vicariously participate in the sexually riotous assemblies. For male colonists, the paintings underlined the need to contain women’s sexuality. In a colonial environment, many feared women’s proximity to native Americans would spur savage behaviors and compromise civil society. Most of the portraits feature young women about to be married, connecting their masked visages with the metaphor of a woman in courtship who masked her affections to attain the best husband. Wollaston’s adoption of mask iconography also resonates with the tumultuous 1760s, marked by the growing political crisis between Great Britain and her American colonies, when colonists questioned the nature of their identity as imperial subjects and feared British duplicity.

Chapter 2 focuses on mid-century Philadelphia’s burgeoning art community through the figure of travelling English portrait painter John Wollaston, who visited the city in 1752 and 1758/9. Wollaston’s presence encouraged the young student Francis Hopkinson to write a poem about the artist in the new periodical the American Magazine. By tracing the aesthetic responses that Hopkinson and the fellow students in his circle (including Benjamin West) had to Wollaston’s portraits the chapter charts Philadelphians’ engagement with the aesthetic debates raging in London over the role of the artist and the power of the portrait to civilize. Hopkinson embraced the new model of connoisseurship being popularized in the British art capital of London but recast it to argue that the portrait could civilize the sitter. Reading Wollaston’s portraits through the model of physiognomy reveals how viewers understood his paintings to improve sitters’ civility and how his paintings forged social connections between sitters.

Chapter 2 traces the intellectual genealogy of the young Benjamin Franklin during a time when he was the most free-spirited and least restrained by social conventions. At age seventeen, having learnt the printing trade, he left Boston. For almost three years, while attempting to find regular work as a printer first in Philadelphia and then London, Franklin continued to read widely and think deep thoughts about his place in the universe. This was the period when he espoused deism and wrote (and published) a short treatise on predestination and determinism (subsequently destroyed) as well as A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity. The chapter discusses the influence on Franklin of the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, and William Wollaston. In 1726, Franklin produced Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion.

The optic chiasm has been a topic of much interest since the first century A.D., when Galen described the union of the optic nerves as a “shape…very much like the letter chi.” In the centuries that followed, many scientists and physicians studied the structural aspects of the optic chiasm, starting with Isaac Newton, who in 1706 first explained that the partial decussation of the optic nerve fibers was necessary for binocular vision. Abraham Vater and J.C. Heinicke provided the first clinical evidence of hemidecussation in 1723, when they described cases of transient “halved vision” (homonymous hemianopia), presumably of migrainous origin, and concluded that the optic nerves decussate before uniting into the optic tracts because “without decussation of fibers in these nerves divided vision can in no way be explained.” The first diagram of decussating fibers was published in 1750 by “Chevalier” John Taylor, an itinerant eye surgeon, notorious for his charlatan ways and a practice “deeply tainted with the dishonest arts of the quack.” In 1824, a century after Vater and Heinicke’s work on hemidecussation, William Wollaston reported experiencing two episodes of half vision in each eye. He concluded that this necessitated hemidecussation of the optic nerves at the chiasm. The growing body of knowledge of chiasmal anatomy and visual fields culminated in the work of Harvey Cushing on the diagnostic recognition and surgical management of pituitary tumors. In December 1901, a 16-year-old girl was referred to Cushing by Sir William Osler. She had headaches and loss of vision and was short, obese, and sexually underdeveloped, appearing as a child of 12. Cushing missed the possible connection of the patient’s symptoms and appearance to the chiasm and the pituitary. After the young girl developed papilledema, Cushing operated first to decompress one cerebral hemisphere and then the other. When both operations failed to restore her vision, he operated a third time on the cerebellum, but the patient died several days later. At autopsy, a large pituitary cyst was discovered.