Greek, and English poets, remembering many passages from them more than forty years afterwards. So great was his accuracy that Withering, with whom he corresponded before the publication of the third edition of the ‘Systematic Arrangement of British Plants’ (1796), said that he would accept his records and remarks without requiring specimens for verification. Coleridge, in his essay on ‘The Soul and its Organs of Sense,’ says of him: ‘The every way amiable and estimable John Gough of Kendal is not only an excellent mathematician, but an infallible botanist and zoologist … the rapidity of his touch appears fully equal to that of sight, and the accuracy greater.’ Wordsworth also alludes to him in the ‘Excursion,’ in the passage in the seventh book beginning
Soul-cheering Light, most bountiful of things!
In 1778, being attracted to mathematics, he went to live as a resident pupil with John Slee at Mungrisdale, Cumberland. He designed for his own use an elaborate form of abacus, with holes in vertical and horizontal rows, and pegs of various forms to represent the digits and algebraical symbols. He afterwards passed threads round these pegs so as to represent geometrical figures. In eighteen months he mastered the principles of conic sections and mechanics, and had begun the study of fluxions, and so great was his subsequent progress that for some years he taught a small number of private pupils. Among these were John Dalton [q. v.], the chemist, who was with him for four or five years, and William Whewell. In 1800 Gough married Mary, daughter of Thomas Harrison of Crosthwaite, by whom he had four sons and five daughters. Of his sons, Thomas Gough, surgeon, contributed a full memoir of Gough and lists of animals, plants, and fossils of the district to the second edition of the ‘Annals of Kendal,’ 1861. In 1823 Gough was first attacked by epilepsy, and on 28 July 1825 he died of that disease at Fowl Ing, Kendal. He was buried in the churchyard of the parish. Gough does not seem to have issued any independent works; but between 1786 and 1813 he communicated fourteen essays to the Manchester Philosophical Society and thirty-six contributions to Nicholson's ‘Philosophical Magazine’ (vols. iii.–xxv., xxxi. and xxxii.). Among the subjects of the former series of essays are the effacement of lakes, the laws of motion of a cylinder, the germination of seeds, the variety of voices, the position of sonorous bodies, the theory of compound sounds, caoutchouc, the theory of mixed gases, vis viva, the ebbing well at Giggleswick, Yorkshire, migratory birds, and statical equilibrium. The latter series treat of nutrition in plants, suspended animation in vegetables, prime factors, ventriloquism as due to reflection, scoteography, or the art of writing in the dark, the atmosphere and its moisture, the mathematical theory of the speaking-trumpet, fairy-rings, facts and observations tending to explain the curious phenomenon of ventriloquism, and various purely mathematical questions.
[Cornelius Nicholson's Annals of Kendal, 2nd ed. 1861, pp. 355–68; Gent. Mag. 1825, ii. 190.]
GOUGH, JOHN BALLANTINE (1817–1886), temperance orator, was born at Sandgate, Kent, 22 Aug. 1817, of parents who were poor but of excellent character, with whom he resided till he was twelve. At that age, in consequence of the poverty of his family, he went out to America with a family who for ten guineas agreed to teach him a trade and take care of him till he was twenty-one, and there he learned the business of a bookbinder. He acquired a love of drink, and for seven years lived recklessly. At length a well-known temperance advocate, Joel Stratton, induced him to take the pledge. He began to attend temperance meetings and to recommend abstinence, when his ability as a speaker attracted notice. Giving up his trade in 1843, he became a temperance lecturer, and was soon the foremost speaker on temperance in the United States.
In 1853 he revisited England at the request of the London Temperance League. He extended his visit to Scotland and lectured to immense audiences in the principal towns. Returning after two years to the United States, he resumed his work there, but revisited Liverpool on 26 Aug. 1857. He remained three years in the United Kingdom. During the two years of his first visit he delivered 438 lectures and travelled 23,224 miles; during the three years of his second, he gave 605 lectures and travelled 40,217 miles. In 1878 he paid a third visit to this country. A splendid welcome was given him by a distinguished assembly in the gardens of Westminster Abbey at the invitation of Dean Stanley. After a month spent on the continent, Gough began his public work in Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle. Advancing years told adversely on his oratory, but his audiences were not less enthusiastic. Besides lecturing on temperance, he lectured on kindred subjects like ‘London Life,’ ‘Habit,’ ‘Curiosity,’ ‘Circumstances,’ &c.
Gough published in 1846 his ‘Autobiography,’ which was subsequently extended
