Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/391

 agent for the Royal Bank of Scotland, a position of emolument and influence.

In 1799 Dale completed the sale of the New Lanark mills to a Manchester company. They appointed as their manager the well-known Robert Owen, who made New Lanark one of the industrial show-places of the world, and who, marrying Dale's daughter, speaks of him most affectionately, though they differed widely on the subject of religion. According to Owen, it was through his persuasion that Dale parted with his interest in other cotton mills. In 1800 Dale purchased for a residence Rosebank, near Glasgow, and, having acquired a handsome fortune, withdrew as far as was possible for him from active business. Some thirty years before he had seceded from the established church of Scotland and founded a new communion on congregational principles, but with an unpaid ministry, which was known as the ‘Old Independents,’ and of which he was during the rest of his life the chief pastor. At one time he was a regular visitor to Bridewell, preaching to the convicts, and he travelled great distances to visit the churches in communion with his own. He learned in later life to read the Old and New Testament in the original, and he was a liberal supporter of the Baptist Missionary Society's scheme for the translation of the Bible into the various languages of Hindostan. To Glasgow, its institutions, and its poor he was a munificent benefactor. On several occasions he mitigated the local effects of dearth by importing at his own risk cargoes of food from abroad, which was sold to the poor at prime cost. In the dearth of 1799–1800 one of these cargoes consisted of Indian corn, then almost unknown in Scotland. In person Dale was short and stout, in temperament lively and cheerful. He had a taste for music and sang old Scotch songs with considerable effect. He died at Glasgow 17 March 1806.

 DALE, SAMUEL (1659?–1739), physician, son of North. Dale, of St. Mary, Whitechapel, silk-thrower, was born between 1658 and 1660. Apprenticed for eight years to an apothecary in 1674, we find him practising as a physician and apothecary at Braintree, Essex, in 1686 (, Hist. Plant. vol. i. preface); but there is no evidence that he was born at that place, that he took a doctor's degree, or that he became a member of the Society of Apothecaries or a licentiate of Royal College of Physicians. Both in the ‘Historia’ and in the two editions of the ‘Synopsis Stirpium Britannicarum’ Ray acknowledged the valuable assistance he had received from Dale's critical knowledge of plants, and it is from the letters of the latter to Sir Hans Sloane that we learn many particulars of the last hours of the great naturalist, whose friend, neighbour, and executor he was. Dale's own chief work was the ‘Pharmacologia,’ which first appeared in 12mo in 1693, a supplement being published in 1705, a second edition in 1710, a third, in quarto, in 1737, and others after the author's death. It is the first systematic work of importance on the subject. His nine contributions to the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ between 1692 and 1736, deal with a variety of subjects, biological and professional, the most important, perhaps, being an account—the first published—of the fossil shells of Harwich Cliff (Phil. Trans. vol. xxi. No. 249, p. 50, and vol. xxiv. No. 291, p. 1568). In 1730 Dale published the second great work of his life, ‘The History and Antiquities of Harwich and Dovercourt,’ by Silas Taylor, his own appendix to which exceeds in bulk the main work, and is a most complete account of the natural history of the district. This book reached a second edition in 1732. Dale died on 6 June 1739, and was buried in the Dissenters' burial-ground, Bocking, near Braintree. His herbarium, bequeathed to the Apothecaries' Company, is now in the British Museum, and the neat and elaborate tickets to the plants, many of which he obtained from the Chelsea garden, and numerous correspondents, show him to have been a botanist of no mean calibre. An oil-painting of Dale is preserved at Apothecaries' Hall, and an autotype, from the engraving by Vertue in the third edition of the ‘Pharmacologia,’ is prefixed to the memoir of him in the ‘Journal of Botany.’ His contributions to the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ have caused him to be erroneously described as a fellow of the Royal Society. Linnæus commemorated his services to botany in the leguminous genus Dalea.

 DALE, THOMAS (d. 1619), naval commander, was already well known as a soldier in the Low Countries, when, in 1609, he was sent out to Virginia as marshal of the colony, the government of which was