Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/14

 English and Latin, on the death of Thomas Kenn’ (Bristol, 4to). The poet's elder brother, George, became in 1673 vicar of Fretherne in Gloucestershire; but he himself does not appear to have obtained a benefice, and nothing is known of him subsequent to 1711. In addition to the works named, two sermons and several elegies were separately published in his name.

An engraving of Perkins by White is mentioned by Bromley.



PERKINS, LOFTUS (1834–1891), engineer and inventor, son of [q. v.], was born on 8 May 1834 in Great Coram Street, London. At a very early age he entered his father's manufactory, and in 1853–4 he practised on his own account as an engineer in New York. Returning to England, he remained with his father until 1862, and from that time to 1866 he was in business at Hamburg and Berlin, designing and executing many installations for warming buildings in various parts of the continent. He again returned to England in 1866, when he entered into a partnership with his father, which continued to the death of the latter in 1881.

Perkins inherited much of the inventive capacity of his father and grandfather, and from 1859 downwards he took out a very large number of patents. The chief subjects to which he directed his attention were, however, the use of very high pressure steam as a motive power, and the production of cold. His yacht Anthracite, constructed in 1880, was fitted with engines working with steam at a pressure of five hundred pounds on the inch, and it is probably the smallest ship that ever crossed the Atlantic steaming the entire distance. The Loftus Perkins, a very remarkable Tyne ferryboat, was worked with compound engines on his system with boilers tested to 200 lb. (Engineer, 2 June 1880). His experiments on the production of cold resulted in the ‘arktos,’ a cold chamber suitable for preserving meat and other articles of food. It is based on the separation of ammonia gas from the water in which it is dissolved, the liquefaction of the gas, and the subsequent revaporisation of the ammonia, with the reabsorption of the gas by the water. This was his last great work, and his unremitting attention to it caused a permanent breakdown of his health.

He became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1861, and of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1881. He died on 27 April 1891, at his house in Abbey Road, Kilburn, London. He married an American, a daughter of Dr. Patten. He left two sons, both of whom are engaged in their father's business, now carried on by a limited company.



PERKINS, WILLIAM (1558–1602), theological writer, son of Thomas Perkins and Hannah his wife, both of whom survived him, was born at Marston Jabbett in the parish of Bulkington in Warwickshire in 1558. In June 1577 he matriculated as a pensioner of Christ's College, Cambridge, where he appears to have studied under [q. v.], from whom he probably first received his puritan bias. His early career gave no promise of future eminence; he was noted for recklessness and profanity, and addicted to drunkenness. From these courses he was, however, suddenly converted by the trivial incident of overhearing a woman in the street allude to him as ‘drunken Perkins,’ holding him up as a terror to a fretful child.

In 1584 he commenced M.A., was elected a fellow of his college, and began to be widely known as a singularly earnest and effective preacher. He preached to the prisoners in the castle, and was appointed lecturer at Great St. Andrews, where both the members of the university and the townsmen flocked in great numbers to listen to him. According to Fuller (Holy State, ed. 1648, p. 81), ‘his sermons were not so plain but that the piously learned did admire them, nor so learned but that the plain did understand them;’ and he seems to have possessed the art of conducting his argument after the strictly logical method then in vogue, while preserving a simplicity of language which made him intelligible to all. His reputation as a theologian progressed scarcely less rapidly, and at a time when controversy between the anglican and puritan parties in the university was at its height, he became noted for his outspoken resistance to all that savoured of Roman usage in the matter of ritual. In a ‘commonplace’ delivered in the chapel of his college (13 Jan. 1586–7), he demurred to the practice of kneeling at the taking of the sacrament, and also to that of turning to the east. Being subsequently cited before the vice-chancellor and certain of the heads, he was ordered to read a paper in which he partly qualified and partly recalled what he was reported to have said. From this time he appears to have used more guarded