Life
Boys was born at Deal on 7 Sept. 1735. He was of an old Kent family (Hasted, History of Kent, iii. 109), being the eldest son of Commodore William Boys, R.N., lieutenant-governor of Greenwich Hospital (c.1700–1774), by his wife, Elizabeth Pearson of Deal (Gent. Mag. lxxiii. pt. i. 421-3). About 1755 he was a surgeon at Sandwich, Kent, where he was noted for his untiring explorations of Richborough Castle, for skill in deciphering ancient manuscripts and inscriptions, for his zeal in collecting antiquities connected with Sandwich, and for his studies in astronomy, natural history, and mathematics. In 1759 he married Elizabeth Wise, a daughter of Henry Wise, one of the Sandwich jurats (ibid.), and by her he had two children. In 1761 he was elected jurat, acting with his wife's father. In the same year, 1761, she died, and in the next year, 1762, he married Jane Fuller, coheiress of her uncle, one John Paramor of Statenborough (ibid.) In 1767 Boys was mayor of Sandwich. In 1774 his father died at Greenwich (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ix. 24 n.)
In 1782 he again served as mayor. In 1783 his second wife died, having borne him eight or nine children (ib., and Hasted, Hist. of Kent, iv. 222 n.) In 1796 he gave up his Sandwich practice and went to reside at Walmer, but returned to Sandwich at the end of three years, in 1799. His health had now declined. He had apoplectic attacks in 1799, and died of apoplexy on 15 March 1803, aged 68.
Boys was buried in St. Clement's Church, Sandwich, where there is a Latin epitaph to his memory, a suggestion for a monument with some doggerel verses, from a correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine (lxxiii. pt. ii. 612), having fallen through. He was a member of the Linnean Society, and a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine (Index, vol. iii. preface, p. lxxiv). A tern found by him at Sandwich was named Sterna boysii, after him, by John Latham in his Index Ornithologicus.
Read more about this topic: William Boys (surgeon)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organize into a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as other are from over-fulness of meat and drink.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)