Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 46.djvu/238

 1783 and 1785; ‘N.W. View of Rochester,’ after J. Farington, 1790; ‘The Morning of the Glorious First of June 1794,’ after R. Cleveley, 1796; ‘The Windmill’ and ‘The Watermill,’ from his own drawings, 1787; and four landscapes after J. Hearne. Pouncy also executed many of the plates in Captain Cook's second and third ‘Voyages,’ after Hodges and Webber, 1777 and 1784; Sir G. Staunton's ‘Embassy of Lord Macartney to China,’ 1797; Farington's ‘Views of the Lakes in Cumberland and Westmorland,’ 1789; Bowyer's ‘History of England,’ Macklin's Bible, and the ‘Copperplate Magazine.’ He was a fellow of the Incorporated Society of Artists, and exhibited topographical views with them in 1772 and 1773; he also sent works of the same class to the Royal Academy in 1782, 1788, and 1789. Woollett engraved ‘The Grotto at Amwell,’ from a drawing by Pouncy, as an illustration to John Scott's ‘Poems,’ 1782. Pouncy died in Pratt Street, Lambeth, on 22 Aug. 1799, and was buried in the graveyard of the parish church.

A portrait of Pouncy, drawn by Edridge, is in the print room of the British Museum.

 POUND, JAMES (1669–1724), astronomer, was the son of John Pound, of Bishop's Canning, Wiltshire, where he was born in 1669. He matriculated at St. Mary Hall, Oxford, on 16 March 1687; graduated B.A. from Hart Hall on 27 Feb. 1694, and M.A. from Gloucester Hall in the same year; and obtained a medical diploma, with a degree of M.B., on 21 Oct. 1697. Having taken orders, he entered the service of the East India Company, and went out to Madras in 1699 as chaplain to the merchants of Fort St. George, whence he proceeded to the British settlement on the islands of Pulo Condore, near the mouth of the River Cambodia. 'He got much in the plantations,' Hearne remarked of him, 'but lost all in an insurrection of the Indians.' On the morning of 3 March 1705 the native troops at Pulo Condore mutinied, conflagration and massacre ensued, and only eleven of the English residents escaped in the sloop Rose to Malacca, and ultimately, after many adventures, reached Batavia. Pound was among the refugees; but his collections and papers were destroyed. A valuable set of documents relating to the catastrophe–some of them composed, others copied, by him–are preserved in the Bodleian Library (Bradley MS. No. 24).

Pound was, in July 1707–a year after his return to England–presented by Sir Richard Child to the rectory of Wanstead in Essex; and the favour of Lord-chancellor Parker secured for him, in January 1720, on Flamsteed's death, that of Burstow in Surrey. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 30 Nov. 1699, but his admittance was deferred until 30 July 1713, when his astronomical career may be said to have begun. Halley communicated to the Royal Society his phase-determinations of the total solar eclipse of 3 May 1715, with the remark that their author was 'furnished with very curious instruments, and well skilled in the matter of observation' (Phil. Trans. xxix. 252). On 14 July 1715 Pound observed an occultation of a star by Jupiter, on 30 Oct. an eclipse of the moon, and made, in 1716 and 1717, various planetary observations all with a fifteen-foot telescope (ib. xxix. 401, xxx. 848, 1109). His account of some of them (ib. xxix. 506) was translated into Russian, and inserted in the St. Petersburg 'Kalendar' for 1737. Huygens's 123-foot object-glass, lent to Pound in 1717 by the Royal Society, was mounted by him in Wanstead Park on the maypole just removed from the Strand, and procured for the purpose by Sir Isaac Newton. A copy of verses affixed to it by a local wit began:

The inconveniences of the 'aerial' instrument thus formed were severely commented upon by J. Crosthwait (, Flamsteed, p. 335). Nevertheless, it was by Pound turned to excellent account. His observations with it of the five known satellites of Saturn enabled Halley to 'rectify' their movements (Phil. Trans xxx. 772). Newton employed, in the third edition of the 'Principia' (pp. 390, 392 of Sir W. Thomson's reprint, 1871), his micrometrical measures of Jupiter's disc, of Saturn's disc and ring, and of the elongations of their satellites; and obtained from him data for correcting the places of the comet of 1680. That a quid pro quo was supplied appears from memoranda in the astronomer's pocket-book of two payments to him by Newton of 52l. 10s. each, in 1719 and 1720. Laplace also availed himself of Pound's observations of Jupiter's satellites for the determination of the planet's mass; and Pound himself compiled in 1719 a set of tables for