Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/67

 chancel of old St. Chad's Church in the same city. He married his cousin Anne, daughter of Daniel Austin, M.A., rector of Berrington, Shropshire, who survived him. By her he had issue a son who died young, and a daughter, Anna Dorothea, who married her cousin, R. W. Stokes of London.



SCOTT, JOSEPH NICOLL, M.D. (1703?–1769), dissenting minister and physician, eldest son of Thomas Scott, independent minister, was born at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, about 1703. His father, the son of Daniel Scott, a London merchant, by his first wife, and half-brother of LL.D. [q. v.], was minister at Back Street Chapel, Hitchin (1700–9), and succeeded John Stackhouse as minister of a secession from the Old Meeting, Norwich, on 13 Oct. 1709. This secession had a meeting-place in the Blackfriars; but about 1717 differences were healed, and the elder Scott became minister of the Old Meeting.

Joseph Nicoll became his father's assistant about 1725. A change of his views in the Arian direction was followed by his dismissal in 1737 or 1738. To his father this was a terrible blow; his nervous system became permanently unhinged; he died on 15 Nov. 1746, aged 66. Doddridge speaks of him as ‘one of the holiest and most benevolent men upon the earth.’ He published two funeral sermons and an ‘Attempt to prove the Godhead of Christ,’ 1726, 8vo (sermon, John xx. 28; cf. his letters in Correspondence of Doddridge, iii. 424 sq.).

Dismissed from the Old Meeting, Scott was established by his friends in a Sunday lectureship at the French church, St. Mary-the-Less. At first he drew considerable audiences, and was patronised by members of the church of England. Two volumes of his discourses (1743) contain many striking sermons; one is on ‘the Mahometan Revelation considered;’ others affirm the ultimate annihilation of the wicked, anticipating the position of (1714–1796) [q. v.] of Norwich. His lecture was discontinued before the publication of the sermons. He studied medicine at Edinburgh, and graduated M.D. in 1744. For some years he practised in Norwich. A Mr. Reynolds, a casual acquaintance and admirer, left him an estate at Felsted, Essex; here he ended his days, dying on 23 Dec. 1769. A monument to his memory is in the Old Meeting, Norwich. ‘The Gracious Warning,’ a monody on his death, by George Wright, was published in 1774, 8vo. His widow (maiden name, Bell) died at Aylsham, Norfolk, in 1799, aged 87 (Gent. Mag. 1799, lxix. 352).

He published: He also revised the etymologies from classic and oriental languages for an issue (1755, fol.) of the ‘English Dictionary,’ by [q. v.]
 * 1) ‘Sermons … in defence of all Religion … Natural or Revealed,’ &c., 1743, 8vo, 2 vols.
 * 2) ‘An Essay towards a Translation of Homer's Works in Blank Verse, with Notes,’ &c., 1755, 4to (a spirited version of thirteen selected passages from the ‘Iliad’).



SCOTT or SCOT, MICHAEL (1175?–1234?), mathematician, physician, and scholar, possibly belonged to the family of the Scots of Balwearie, near Kirkcaldy in Fife, whose ruined castle has been identified with Castle Wearie in the weird ballad of Lammikin. Sir Walter Scott erred in identifying him with Sir Michael Scot of Balwearie, who, with Sir David Wemyss of Wemyss, was sent to fetch the Maid of Norway to Scotland in 1290. The scholar died before 1235. More probably he belonged to the border country whence all the families of Scot originally came, and where the traditions of his magic power are common. He was probably born before 1180. After he had studied successively at Oxford and at Paris (where he acquired the title of ‘mathematicus’), he passed to Bologna, and thence to Palermo, where he entered the service of Don Philip, the clerk register of the court of Frederick II, in Sicily. Subsequently he continued his studies at Toledo. It has been conjectured by an anonymous commentator on Dante that Michael became the young king's tutor in Sicily, and that at Toledo he gained a knowledge of Arabic sufficient to enable him to translate ‘the writings of Aristotle on Natural History and Mathematics.’ At Toledo he wrote his ‘Abbreviatio Avicennæ,’ of which the colophon in the Vatican manuscript runs ‘Explicit anno domini MCCX.’ That he gained a knowledge of Arabic at Toledo is corroborated not only by the evidence of this and other works attributed to him, but by the contemporary authority of Roger Bacon (Opus Majus, London, ed. 1735, p. 36). In another place (‘Compendium Studii,’ Opera minora, ed. Brewer, p. 472), Bacon observes, with a touch of the jealousy of a rival scholar, ‘Michael Scot, like Herman,’ a German bishop and scholar of the same period,