Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/401

Rh joined them in condemning the policy of the government. On the trial of the miners he acted as their attorney without a fee, and in conjunction with Butler Cole Aspinall, barrister-at-law, obtained a verdict in their favour. He was returned as representative of the Bendigo miners to the legislative council of Victoria in November 1855, when he proposed the throwing open of the lands to the people. He also advocated vote by ballot, manhood suffrage, unsectarian education, and other measures which were afterwards passed into law. In the following year he was elected a member for the Sandhurst boroughs under the new constitution. In 1859 he was returned for Avoca. He first took office in Richard Heales's ministry as vice-president of the board of land and works, and commissioner of public works, and served from 26 Nov. 1860 to 20 Feb. 1861, during which period, in conjunction with the president of the board of lands, he initiated the occupation licenses, the first step towards settling the people on the lands. On the death of Heales, 19 June 1864, Grant succeeded him on 5 Sept. as president of the board of lands. His administration of this department was successful, and many well-to-do selectors settled on the public lands under the celebrated '42nd clause' of the Land Act of 1865. When the second M'Culloch ministry was constituted, 11 July 1868, he again undertook the administration of the lands department, and remained in office until 20 Sept. 1869. He joined Sir Charles Gavan Duffy 19 June 1871, and continued at the lands department until 10 June 1872. He was then out of office until 9 Aug. 1875, when he became minister of justice in the Berry administration, which post he held only until 25 Oct. in the same year. He took the same position in the second Berry administration, from 22 May 1877 to 5 March 1880. The last appointment he held was in Sir Bryan O'Loghlen's government, when he was chief secretary from 9 July 1881 to 8 March 1883. During these various changes he had continued to sit as the representative for Avoca, and was always considered to be one of the most prominent land reformers in Australia. He died 1 April 1885.

[Men of the Time in Australia, Victoria, 1878. p. 73; Heaton's Australian Dict. of Dates, 1879 p. 81; Times, 4 April 1885, p. 9.]  GRANT, JAMES WILLIAM (1788–1865), astronomer, was born at Wester Elchies in Morayshire on 12 Aug. 1788. His father, Robert Grant, made a fortune abroad, and bought about 1783 the Elchies estate, hereditary in a branch of his family, to which he subsequently added the lands of Knockando and Ballintomb. James William Grant entered the East India Company's service as a writer on 22 July 1805, and filled appointments of increasing importance in Bengal until his retirement in 1849. He employed his leisure in scientific pursuits, and with an excellent five-foot achromatic he detected, on 23 July 1844, the companion of Antares, two years before the duplicity of the star was perceived by Mitchel. Excessive modesty, however, caused him to neglect publishing the discovery, which became known only through Professor Piazzi Smyth's examination of his observing papers. On his elder brother's death, in 1828, he inherited the family estates. He returned to Scotland in 1849, and erected at Elchies a fine observatory in granite, the entrance guarded by sphinxes. Here was placed the 'Trophy Telescope,' conspicuous in 1851 in the nave of the Great Exhibition, and the first large telescope erected in Scotland. The object-glass, eleven inches in diameter, was by Ross, the mount by Ransome & May. Grant's use of it was hampered by the climate and growing ill-health; but Professor Piazzi Smyth found its performance excellent in a set of observations on double stars made at Elchies in the autumn of 1862 (Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Soc. xxiii. 2). It was sold in 1864 to Mr. Aytoun of Glenfarg, Perthshire.

Grant was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society on 13 Jan. 1854. His sole publication was a letter 'On the Influence of Climate upon the Telescopic Appearance of a Celestial Body' (ib. xiv. 165), accompanying two sketches of Mars, made respectively at Calcutta and Elchies. He was an accomplished microscopist, his slides evoking the admiration of native and foreign experts. Botany, natural history, and painting were also cultivated by him. He married Margaret, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Wilson of Gamrie in Banffshire, and had by her eight sons and four daughters, all born in India. The present laird of Elchies is his grandson. He died at Wester Elchies of gout on 17 Sept. 1865, and was buried in Knockando churchyard. His wife died in London on 28 Jan. 1855. Grant's mind was one of singular sweetness and elevation, and he was regretted alike as a friend, a landlord, and a benefactor to the poor.

[Information from the family; Banffshire Journal, 19 Sept. 1865; Lachlan Shaw's Hist. of the Province of Moray, i. 112, 117 (1882); Jervise's Epitaphs and Inscriptions in the Northeast of Scotland, i. 299 (1875); Monthly Notices, xxiii. 1 (Professor R. Grant); Good Words, iv. 125, February 1863 (Professor Piazzi Smyth); Dodwell's Bengal Civil Servants.] 