Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/434

 Thoughts on Building and Planting, to Sir James Lowther, 1755,’ which was accompanied by a set of useful scientific notes on the mines, drawn up by his friend,, F.R.S. [q. v.], a physician resident at Whitehaven. The greater part of the former poem is printed with the notes in Hutchinson's ‘Cumberland,’ ii. 54–6, 161, and both of the poems are reproduced in Pearch's ‘Collection,’ i. 23–43, 64–7. Dalton's verses on ‘Keswick's hanging woods and mountains wild’ are much praised in Thomas Sanderson's ‘Poems’ (Carlisle, 1800), pp. 84, 226–7. Brotherly affection prompted his preliminary puff of Richard Dalton's artistic efforts in the work entitled ‘Remarks on XII. Historical Designs of Raphael and the Musæum Græcum et Ægyptiacum, or Antiquities of Greece and Egypt, illustrated by prints intended to be published from Mr. Dalton's drawings,’ 1752.



DALTON, JOHN (1726–1811), captain H.E.I.C. service, defender of Trichinopoly 1752–3, was the only child of Captain James Dalton, 6th foot (now Warwickshire regiment), by a Limerick lady named Smith. He was great-great-grandson of Colonel John Dalton, of Caley Hall, near Otley, a royalist officer of an old Yorkshire family, desperately wounded in the civil wars. Captain James Dalton fell in the West Indies in 1742, probably in one of the minor descents on Cuba after the British failure before Carthagena. He had previously obtained for his son, then a boy of fifteen, a second lieutenancy in the 8th marines, lately raised by Colonel Sir Thomas Hanmer. Young Dalton embarked with a small detachment of that corps in the Preston, 50 guns, commanded by the sixth Earl of Northesk, which sailed from Spithead in May 1744; and after serving off Madagascar and Batavia, arrived in Balasore roads in September 1745, and was afterwards employed on the Coromandel coast. When the marine regiments were disbanded in 1748, Dalton was appointed first lieutenant of one of the independent marine companies formed on shore at Madras by order of Admiral Boscawen. The year after he transferred his services to the East India Company, and became captain of a company of European grenadiers, and made the campaigns of the next three years against the French under Dupleix and their native allies. In June 1752 he was appointed by Major Stringer Lawrence commandant of Trichinopoly, which place he defended with great skill and bravery against treachery within and overwhelming numbers of assailants without for several months, until the little garrison, the European portion of which had been reduced to a mere handful by repeated sorties, was finally relieved in the autumn of 1753. Dalton resigned his appointment on the ground of ill-health 1 March 1754, and received the thanks of the governor in council for his services. He returned to England in 1754, at the age of twenty-eight, having ‘amassed a fortune of 10,000l. and a fair share of military fame.’ His name appears in the ‘Army List’ for 1755 as a first lieutenant on half-pay of the reduced twelve marine companies formed by order of Admiral Boscawen, but he seems to have commuted his half-pay. He married at Ripon, on 7 March 1756, the second daughter of Sir John Wray, bart., of Glentworth, Lincolnshire, and Sleningford, Yorkshire. After his wife's death in 1787 Dalton resided at Sleningford, which he had purchased from her brother. He died 11 July 1811. Of his three sons, (1) Thomas, captain in the 11th dragoons, succeeded to Norcliffe estates in 1807, and took the name Norcliffe; (2) John, colonel of the 4th light dragoons, inherited Wray estates; (3) James, rector of Croft, Yorkshire, was an eminent botanist (collections now in York Museum). He also had three daughters.



DALTON, JOHN (1766–1844), chemist and natural philosopher, was born at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth in Cumberland, on 6 Sept. 1766. His father, Joseph Dalton, was a poor weaver, undistinguished either for parts or energy, who married in 1755 Deborah Greenup, a woman of strong character, and, like himself, a member of the Society of Friends. The Greenups of Caldbeck were a respectable family of yeomen; the Daltons were husbandmen and artisans, although Joseph Dalton inherited, shortly before his death in 1787, a freehold of sixty acres acquired by his father Jonathan, a shoemaker at Eaglesfield. John Dalton was the youngest of three children who reached maturity out