Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/161

 others dropped down the river in an open boat to Taro, where they freighted a sloop and reached Lisbon on 21 Dec. 1780, and then proceeded to Falmouth.

Being detained in England under his parole until an exchange of prisoners was arranged, Wright visited a Scottish botanical friend named Baxter at Oldham, Hampshire, until the return of the remnant of his regiment from Spain. In April 1782 they sailed once more, being now known as the 99th foot; but arriving in the West Indies just after Rodney's victory over De Grasse, the regiment was sent home and disbanded, while Wright was permitted to remain to settle his private affairs and replace his lost hortus siccus. This he did very completely, adding several new species, and having in 1784 the assistance of the Swedish botanist Olaf Schwartz. He was appointed physician-general of Jamaica; but suffering from fever and ague, and having realised his property, he returned home in 1785, and, after spending most of 1786 in Perthshire, settled at Edinburgh. He was nominated to succeed John Hope (1725–1786) [q. v.] in the chair of botany, but refused to stand against Daniel Rutherford [q. v.], contenting himself with the formation of a library, a scientific correspondence with no fewer than two hundred and sixty acquaintances, and the training of a few other students in his house with his nephew James.

In 1792 Wright was summoned as a witness before the committee of the House of Commons on the slave trade; and in 1795, in spite of the opposition of Sir Lucas Pepys [q. v.], the head of the army medical board, and of the Royal College of Physicians, on the ground of his not being one of their licentiates, he was appointed physician to the expedition sent to the West Indies under Sir Ralph Abercromby [q. v.] He sailed in December in the William and John hospital ship, reaching Barbados on 21 Feb. 1796. Wright stayed two years in Barbados, during which time he drew up a report on the diseases common among troops in the West Indies and made a large collection of Windward Island plants. On his return to England in June 1798, after narrowly escaping capture by the French on the voyage, he was retained on full pay for four months, and was offered an honorary extra licentiateship of the College of Physicians, which latter he declined. He settled in Edinburgh, only practising gratuitously among his university friends and the poor, arranging his natural history collections, which were among the largest private museums in the kingdom, and taking an active part in the scientific societies of the city. Until 1811 he made an annual tour in the north-west highlands, often in the company of John Stuart (1743–1821) [q. v.], minister of Luss, Dumbartonshire, who was related to him by marriage, walking six or seven miles a day. He assisted his friend James Currie [q. v.] in forming, in conjunction with William Roscoe [q. v.], the herbarium of the Liverpool Botanical Garden. Himself a Neptunist in geology, he became in 1808 an original member and vice-president of the Wernerian Society; and when in 1809 the collections made by (Sir) William Jackson Hooker [q. v.] in Iceland were destroyed by a fire on board ship, he presented him with an herbarium and specimens of minerals collected in that island by his nephew James Wright, who had accompanied Sir John Stanley thither in 1789, a kindness acknowledged by Hooker in his ‘Recollections of a Tour in Iceland in 1809.’ In 1800 he was invited by Sir Ralph Abercromby to accompany him to Egypt as physician to the army, but declined.

Wright died unmarried in Edinburgh on 19 Sept. 1819, and was buried in Grey Friars churchyard. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1778, president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1801, and associate of the Linnean Society in 1807. He published no separate volume of his own, but in 1800 printed a chronological collection of Edinburgh medical graduation theses, and contributed various medical papers to different publications, a selection from which, and from the notes in his herbarium, was reprinted in a ‘Memoir’ of him published in 1828. This volume also contains a vignette portrait engraved by William Home Lizars after a miniature by John Caldwell. An index by him to the Linnæan names of the plants mentioned in James Grainger's poems was printed in the 1836 edition. Dr. Roxburgh named a genus Wrightea in his honour, but, this proving to have been already named Wallichia, Robert Brown dedicated another to him as Wrightia. His dried plants occur in various herbaria, especially those of Patrick Neill (1776–1851) [q. v.], in possession of the Edinburgh Botanical Society and the Liverpool Botanical Garden.

[Memoir of Dr. William Wright, London, 1828, 8vo; Nichols's Literary Illustrations, iii. 781.]  WRIGHT, WILLIAM (1773–1860), aural surgeon, born at Dartford in Kent on 28 May 1773, was son of William and Margaret Wright. He was educated under John Cunningham Saunders [q. v.], and was therefore in all probability a student of St. Thomas's Hospital. He does not appear to have obtained any medical diploma or