noticed above; (4) Sermons preached on several occasions before King William and Queen Anne, 1707; (5) Preface to the works of Offspring Blackall, bishop of Exeter, edited by Sir W. Dawes, in 2 vols. fol. 1723. In this preface he bears enthusiastic, and evidently sincere, testimony to the excellence of Bishop Blackall. Dawes appears in Theophilus Cibber's ‘Lives of Poets.’
[Works of Sir W. Dawes, with life prefixed.]
DAWES, WILLIAM RUTTER (1799–1868), astronomer, was born on 19 March 1799 at Christ's Hospital, where his father was mathematical master. He lost his mother at an early age, and on his father's appointment as governor of Sierra Leone, he was sent to live with his grandfather at Portsmouth, and thence transferred in 1807 to the care of Thomas Scott [q. v.], author of the ‘Commentary.’ His residence with him at Aston-Sandford, Buckinghamshire, interrupted by two years (1811–13) spent at Charterhouse School, terminated only with Mr. Scott's death in 1821. A profession had now to be chosen, and the dissatisfaction felt by young Dawes with certain tenets of the church of England induced him to substitute that of medicine for the ecclesiastical career designed for him by his father. He accordingly passed through the usual course at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and settled as a medical practitioner at Haddenham in Buckinghamshire, there marrying Mrs. Scott, the widow of his late tutor. At Liverpool, whither he removed in 1826, he again contemplated entering the clerical profession; but his former scruples revived. Finally Dr. Raffles prevailed upon him to take charge of a small independent congregation at Ormskirk in Lancashire.
Here he erected his first observatory, the chief instrument in which was a 5-foot Dollond, of 33/4 inches aperture (Mem. R. Astr. Soc. v. 135). Already, however, a little achromatic of 1.6 inches, mounted at an open window of his house in Liverpool, had enabled him (as he related in a letter to Sir J. Herschel on 17 Dec. 1867) to distinguish a number of double stars belonging to Sir W. Herschel's second and third classes, such as Castor, Rigel, Polaris, γ Virginis, &c. His first published observation was of an occultation of Aldebaran, made at Ormskirk on 9 Dec. 1829 (Monthly Notices, i. 147), and he communicated on 23 April 1831 his measurements of the triple star ζ Cancri (ib. ii. 34). Thenceforward the observation and measurement of double stars constituted Dawes's special line of work, for which his extraordinarily keen vision and attentive habits of accuracy peculiarly fitted him. His ‘Micrometrical Measurements of 121 Double Stars, taken at Ormskirk during the years 1830, 1831, 1832, and 1833,’ were inserted in the eighth volume, and similar results for a hundred stars obtained from 1834 to 1839 in the nineteenth volume of the ‘Memoirs’ of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was admitted a member of that body on 14 May 1830.
Ill-health obliged him to resign his ministerial duties at Ormskirk, and he accepted in the autumn of 1839 the charge of the observatory at South Villa, Regent's Park, belonging to George Bishop [q. v.] Continuing to devote his principal attention to double stars, the results of his measurements, between 1839 and 1844, of about two hundred and fifty such objects, several of them very close pairs, were published in Mr. Bishop's ‘Astronomical Observations at South Villa’ (London, 1852). They included his detection of orbital movement in ε Hydræ, as well as of the faint third components of Σ 3022, and, independently of the Pulkowa observations, of γ Andromedæ. His engagement with Mr. Bishop terminated in the spring of 1844, when he removed his residence from St. John's Wood to Camden Lodge, near Cranbrook, Kent. The observatory fitted up by him there in 1845 was described in the ‘Memoirs’ of the Royal Astronomical Society (xvi. 323). Its instrumental equipment consisted mainly in a transit-circle by Simms two feet in diameter, and an equatoreal by Merz & Mahler of 6½ inches aperture and 8½ feet focus, capable of disclosing the fifth and sixth stars in the Orion trapezium. With these he worked indefatigably until driven, by deplorable suffering from headaches and asthma, to resort to Torquay. He even contemplated the necessity of finally abandoning his astronomical pursuits; but a favourable change enabled him in 1850 to resume them at Wateringbury, near Maidstone, where, unconscious of Bond's discovery in America, he perceived Saturn's dusky ring on 25 and 29 Nov. of the same year. His services to astronomy were recognised by the bestowal on 9 Feb. 1855 of the Astronomical Society's gold medal, in presenting which Sir George Airy dwelt upon his high merits as an accurate, skilled, and keen observer. His last change of residence was in 1857 to Hopefield, Haddenham. His instrumental resources were there reinforced in May 1859 with a fine equatoreal of 81/4 in. aperture, by Alvan Clark of Boston, capable of clearly dividing γ2 Andromedæ, and six years later with an 8-inch Cooke's achromatic.
Dawes married for the second time in 1842 the widow of Mr. John Welsby, solicitor, of Ormskirk. After her death in December 1860
