Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/39

  cerpta e Rotulis Finium, vols. i. ii.; List of Sheriffs to 1831, Publ. Rec. Office Lists and Indexes, No. ix; Deputy-Keeper of Publ. Records' 32nd Rep. App. i. 259–60; Annals of Osney, Winchester, Burton, Dunstaple, Worcester, and Wykes, in Annales Monastici, vols. ii. iii. iv.; Red Book of the Exchequer, vols. i. ii.; Chronica Johannis de Oxenedes; Rishanger's Chronicle; Flores Historiarum, vol. ii.; Bart. de Cotton's Historia Anglicana; Peckham's Letters, vol. ii.; Royal Letters Henry III, vol. ii.; Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II, vol. i.; Trokelowe's Opus Chronicorum, p. 9; Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora, vol. v., the last eleven being in the Rolls Series; Rishanger's Chron. de Bello (Camden Soc.); Liber de Antiquis Legibus (Camden Soc.); Calendar of Patent Rolls; Calendar of Close Rolls; Calendar of Papal Registers, Papal Letters, vol. i.; Michel and Bémont's Rôles Gascons in Documents Inédits; Bémont's Simon de Montfort; Dugdale's Baronage, i. 670; Stubbs's Select Charters; Foss's Judges of England, ii. 504, 505; Hoare's Modern Wiltshire, vols. ii. iii.]  WALES, JAMES (1747–1795), portrait-painter and architectural draughtsman, born in 1747, was a native of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire. Early in life he went to Aberdeen, where he was educated at Marischal College, and soon drifted into art. Having painted a striking likeness of Francis Peacock, a local art amateur, he received a number of commissions for portraits, principally small in size, and painted upon tinplate, and occasionally sold a landscape; but, being dissatisfied with his prospects, he went to London. Practically self-taught, he had a faculty for profiting by what he saw, and painted landscape in the manner of Poussin; but his exhibited works at the Royal Academy and elsewhere between 1783 and 1791 were portraits. In 1791 he went to India, where, although he painted numerous portraits of native princes and others, and executed the sketches from which Thomas Daniell [q. v.] painted his picture of Poona Durbar, which is said to be ‘unrivalled perhaps for oriental grouping, character, and costume,’ his attention was mainly occupied in making drawings of the cave temples and other Indian architectural remains. He worked with Daniell at the Ellora excavations, and twenty-four drawings by him are engraved in Daniell's ‘Oriental Scenery.’ He was engaged upon a series of sketches of the sculptures of Elephanta, when he died, it is thought at Thânâ, in November 1795. His wife Margaret, daughter of William Wallace of Dundee, and his family accompanied him to India; and his eldest daughter, Susanna, married Sir Charles Warre Malet [q. v.], the resident at Poona, in 1799.

[Memorial Tablet in Bombay Cathedral; Indian Antiquary, 1880; Scottish Notes and Queries, vols. iii. and iv.; Burke's Peerage; Thom's Aberdeen; Moor's Hindu Pantheon, 1810; Bryan's and Redgrave's Dicts.]  WALES, OWEN (d. 1378), soldier. [See .]

WALES, WILLIAM (1734?–1798), mathematician, was born about 1734. He first distinguished himself as a contributor to the ‘Ladies' Diary,’ a magazine containing mathematical problems of an advanced nature [see ]. In 1769 he was sent by the Royal Society to the Prince of Wales fort on the north-west coast of Hudson's Bay to observe the transit of Venus. The results of his investigations were communicated to the society (Transactions, lix. 467, 480, lx. 100, 137), and were published in 1772 under the title ‘General Observations made at Hudson's Bay,’ London, 4to. During his stay at Hudson's Bay he employed his leisure in computing tables of the equations to equal altitudes for facilitating the determination of time. They appeared in the ‘Nautical Almanac’ for 1773, and were republished in 1794 in his treatise on ‘The Method of finding the Longitude by Timekeepers,’ London, 8vo.

Wales returned to England in 1770, and in 1772 he published ‘The Two Books of Apollonius concerning Determinate Sections,’ London, 4to, an attempt to restore the fragmentary treatise of Apollonius of Perga. The task had been more successfully carried out by Robert Simson [q. v.] at an earlier date, but the results of his labours were not published until 1776 in his posthumous works. In 1772 Wales was engaged, with William Bayly [q. v.], by the board of longitude to accompany Cook in the Resolution on his second voyage round the world, and to make astronomical observations. He returned to England in 1774, and on 7 Nov. 1776 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1777 the astronomical observations made during the voyage were published, with an introduction by Wales, at the expense of the board of longitude, in a quarto volume with charts and plates. In the same year appeared his ‘Observations on a Voyage with Captain Cook;’ and in 1778 his ‘Remarks on Mr. Forster's Account of Captain Cook's Last Voyage’ (London, 8vo); a reply to Johann Georg Adam Forster [q. v.], who, with his father, had accompanied the expedition as naturalist, and had published an unauthorised account of the voyage a few weeks before Cook's narrative appeared, in