Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 18.djvu/167

 impartial, and candid spirit, and his work was much more extensive than even his published works and papers show. He was always seeking fresh evidence and developing his ideas, many of which he never committed to writing, owing to the great retentiveness of his memory. Having returned hastily from Gibraltar to support the claims of Charles Darwin to the Copley medal of the Royal Society, he suffered much from exposure and fatigue, and in January 1865 he was attacked by acute rheumatism, with disease of the heart and lungs, of which he died in London on 31 Jan. 1865. He was buried at Kensal Green on 4 Feb. following. At the time of his death he was a vice-president of the Royal Society (having been elected F.R.S. in 1845), and foreign secretary of the Geological Society. A Falconer memorial fund amounting to nearly 2,000l. was collected, part of which provided a marble bust of him by T. Butler for the Royal Society's rooms, another bust being placed, by a separate subscription, in the museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta. A Falconer memorial fellowship for medical or natural science graduates of not more than three years' standing was also founded in the university of Edinburgh for the encouragement of the study of palæontology and geology.

His intimate friend, Dr. Charles Murchison [q. v.], arranged his notes and republished his palæontological memoirs in two volumes, 1868, under the title ‘Palæontological Memoirs and Notes of the late Hugh Falconer.’ These volumes are now among the classics of palæontology. A portrait is prefixed. Dr. Murchison, in summing up his character, speaks of ‘his penetrating and discriminating judgment, his originality of observation and depth of thought, his extraordinary memory, his fearlessness of opposition when truth was to be evolved, the scrupulous care with which he awarded to every man his due, and his honest and powerful advocacy of that cause which his strong intellect led him to adopt.’ He was ‘a staid adviser, a genial companion, and a hearty friend.’ A list of his papers is given in the ‘Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers,’ vol. ii. 1868.

[Murchison's Biog. Sketch, prefixed to Falconer's Palæontological Memoirs.]  FALCONER, JOHN (fl. 1547), merchant, appears to have been the first Englishman who possessed a series of dried plants, a method of study first practised by Luca Ghini of Bologna, who also was the earliest public teacher of botany in Europe, and the originator of botanical gardens. From the few scattered records preserved we learn that he travelled on the continent, and from 1540 or 1541 to 1547 he was living at Ferrara, which he left in the last-named year. He was a fellow-pupil of William Turner, the father of English botany, at Bologna, and is mentioned in Turner's ‘Herbal’ several times with great respect on account of his attainments. ‘Maister Falkonner's Boke’ is the earliest mention we have of an herbarium, the indispensable adjunct of the scientific and accurate knowledge of plants.

[Amatus Lusitanus, Enarr. in Dios. Strassburg, 1554; W. Turner's Herbal, 2nd ed. fol. 11 verso; R. Pulteney's Sketches, i. 71, 72; E. H. F. Meyer's Gesch. der Botanik, iv. 240, 270–1.]  FALCONER or FALKNER, JOHN (1577–1656), jesuit, son of Henry Falconer by Martha Pike, his wife, was born at Lytton, Dorsetshire, on 25 March 1577. His mother belonged to a respectable Cheshire family, and his maternal uncle was Sir Richard Morton. His parents were catholics, and both died while he was an infant. He was brought up by his uncle, John Brook, a merchant, until he was eleven years old, when he was sent to the grammar school of Sherborne, Dorsetshire, for five years. His brother then sent him to Oxford, where he studied for nearly a year in St. Mary's Hall, and for another year in Gloucester Hall. Subsequently he joined the expedition of the Earl of Essex to Spain, and ‘after being tossed about by many storms’ he returned to London, where he spent two years and a half in the service of Lord Henry Windsor. In 1598 he was reconciled to the catholic church. Going to Rome he was admitted into the English College on 19 May 1600, under the assumed name of Dingley. He was ordained priest 20 Dec. 1603, entered the Society of Jesus 18 Nov. 1604, and three years later was sent upon the English mission. His name occurs in a list of twelve jesuits banished in 1618 (, Church Hist. ii. 393). He was professed of the four vows 22 July 1619. In 1621 he had returned from exile, and was exercising his spiritual functions in London. After serving as a missioner in the Oxford district, he was appointed socius to the master of novices at Watten in 1633, and subsequently confessor at Liège and Ghent. At one period he was penitentiary at St. Peter's, Rome. He was chaplain at Wardour Castle during its siege by Sir Edward Hungerford in 1643, took an active part in its gallant defence by Lady Blanche Arundell [q. v.], and was employed in treating with the enemy for terms of honourable capitulation. He died on 7 July 1656. 