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 secretary to the ‘Society for promoting Constitutional Information,’ a radical association which numbered (Sir) (1746–1794) [q. v.] among its members, but he can have held this post only a short time. In consequence of a plan which he had formed of rendering the New Testament into biblical Hebrew, he got into communication with [q. v.], who, shortly after his appointment to the professorship of Hebrew at Oxford, got Yeates a bible clerkship at All Souls', whence he matriculated on 22 May 1802, but never graduated. Though he laboured for many years at this translation, and received encouragement from the continent as well as in England, the only portion of it ever published was a specimen which appeared in the third annual report of the London Jews' Society. From about 1808 to 1815 Yeates was employed by [q. v.] to catalogue and describe the oriental manuscripts brought by him from India; and for much of this period he lived in Cambridge, where the University Press published (1812) his ‘Collation of an India Copy of the Pentateuch;’ the copies of this work were presented by the press to Yeates. He also, through Buchanan, obtained some employment from the Bible Society, and superintended their editions of the Æthiopic Psalter and the Syriac New Testament. After Buchanan's death he was helped by (1756–1837) [q. v.], bishop of St. David's, who procured for him the secretaryship of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1823 the post of assistant in the printed book department of the British Museum, which he retained till his death. In 1818 he published a work called ‘Indian Church History,’ compiled chiefly from Assemani and the reports of Buchanan and Kerr, and containing an account of the Christian churches in the East, with an ultra-conservative history of their origin. The same year he produced a ‘Variation Chart of all the Navigable Oceans and Seas between latitude 60 degrees N. and S. from Documents, and delineated on a new plan;’ and in 1819 a very faulty Syriac grammar, the first that ever appeared in English. He was also employed by the publishers of Caleb Ashworth's ‘Hebrew Grammar’ to revise the third and subsequent editions. In 1830 he published ‘Remarks on the Bible Chronology, being an Essay towards reconciling the same with the Histories of the Eastern Nations;’ in 1833 ‘A Dissertation on the Antiquity of the Pyramids;’ and in 1835 ‘Remarks on the History of Ancient Egypt.’ His work was for the most part retrograde and antiquated, and in consequence attracted little attention. His astronomical publications involved him in financial difficulties, which the Literary Fund helped him to meet. He died on 7 Oct. 1839.

 YEATS, GRANT DAVID (1773–1836), medical writer, born in Florida in 1773, was the son of David Yeats, a physician of East Florida. He matriculated from Hertford College, Oxford, on 21 Jan. 1790, graduating B.A. on 15 Oct. 1793, M.A. on 25 May 1796, M.B. on 4 May 1797. He was incorporated M.B. at Dublin in 1807, and graduated M.D. from Trinity College, Oxford, on 7 June 1814. He spent two winter sessions in Edinburgh and one in London, and then commenced to practise at Bedford, where he assisted in the establishment of the Bedford general infirmary, and at a later period of the lunatic asylum near the town. He was nominated physician to each of these institutions. While at Bedford he acquired the friendship of [q. v.] and of John Russell, sixth duke of Bedford [see under, first ].

Yeats's most important work, ‘Observations on the Claims of the Moderns to some Discoveries in Chemistry and Physiology’ (London, 8vo), was published in 1798, after he had settled at Bedford. In it he called attention to the experiments of [q. v.], whose merits [q. v.] had discovered two years before. Like most of Mayow's admirers, Yeats applauded with too little discrimination, but he assisted to rescue his achievements from oblivion.

On the Duke of Bedford's nomination to the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland Yeats accompanied him to Dublin in March 1806 as his private physician. While at Dublin he was instrumental in establishing the Dublin Humane Society, and was made a member of Trinity College. On the duke's return to England in 1807 he resumed his position at Bedford. About 1814 he removed to London, where he was admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians on 30 Sept. 1814, and a fellow on 30 Sept. 1815. He was Gulstonian lecturer in 1817, censor in 1818, and Croonian lecturer in 1827. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 1 July 1819, and died at Tunbridge Wells on 14 Nov. 1836. He married a daughter of [q. v.]

Yeats was the author of:  ‘An Address on the Nature and Efficacy of the Cowpox in preventing the Smallpox,’ London, 1803, 