Royal Society, p. 208), and thence to Bury St. Edmund's, where his uncle, Dr. Charlton Wollaston (see Munk, Coll. of Phys.), had practised. Here he made acquaintance with Rev. Henry Hasted (elected F.R.S. 1812, fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge; Graduati Cantabr. 1856), who became one of his closest friends, and with whom he carried on a correspondence throughout his life. On 14 April 1794 he was admitted candidate, and on 30 March 1795 fellow, of the Royal College of Physicians, of which he became censor in 1798, and an elect on 13 Feb. 1824 on the death of James Hervey.
By the advice of his friends he went to London, and set up practice at No. 18 Cecil Street, Strand, in 1797, and from his house noticed the mirage on the Thames, an occurrence which, though not rare, is easily overlooked.
His devotion to various branches of natural science, including physics, chemistry, and botany, had been increasing, and in 1800 he decided to retire from medical practice. Sir John Barrow [q. v.] (Sketches of the Royal Society, p. 55) attributes this determination to Wollaston's pique at his failure to obtain the appointment as physician at St. George's Hospital; but the true explanation lies probably in his sensitiveness and over-anxiety for his patients. On one occasion a question with regard to a patient caused him to burst into tears; of his decision to abandon medicine he writes to Hasted on 29 Dec. 1800: ‘Allow me to decline the mental flagellation called anxiety, compared with which the loss of thousands of pounds is as a fleabite.’ Wollaston is stated to have received a legacy at this time; his means were, at any rate, insufficient, and in abandoning the ‘terra firma of physic’ he writes that he ‘may have erred egregiously and be ruined.’ It was to chemical research that he looked to replace the renounced ‘thousands.’ In 1801 he took a house, No. 14 Buckingham Street, Fitzroy Square, and at the back set up a laboratory, whose privacy he guarded to the utmost (for anecdotes on this point see G. Wilson's Religio Chemici, p. 287). Within five years he had discovered a process for making platinum malleable, which he kept secret till near his death, and which brought him in a fortune of about 30,000l.; while at the same time his published researches on optics and chemistry placed him among the foremost scientific men of Europe. In 1802 he was awarded the Copley medal, and on 30 Nov. 1804 he was elected secretary of the Royal Society, a post which he retained till 30 Nov. 1816; later he was frequently elected a vice-president.
On the illness and death of Sir Joseph Banks [q. v.] the council of the Royal Society proposed, in accordance with Banks's own desire, to nominate Wollaston as his successor in the chair; but, knowing the ambitions of Sir Humphry Davy [q. v.], Wollaston declined a contest, although he consented to act as president ad interim from 29 June 1820 till the election day on 30 Nov. following. In 1823 he was elected a foreign associate of the French Academy of Sciences.
The chief events in Wollaston's life are his discoveries, which flowed in uninterrupted succession from 1800 down to the time of his death, and of which an account is given below. In 1807 it was suggested that his brother, Francis John Hyde Wollaston [q. v.], on being appointed master of Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, should resign the Jacksonian professorship, which Wollaston was anxious to obtain; but on Francis Wollaston's resignation in 1813 the post was given to William Farish [q. v.]
Each year in the vacation of the Royal Society Wollaston spent some time in travelling about in England or abroad, generally with one or more companions. His chief interest was in seeing manufactures; of all the objects he saw, the machinery of Manchester perhaps ‘left the most vivid impression.’ But his lively letters to Hasted show him to be keenly concerned in general affairs. In 1814 a visit to France, immediately on the conclusion of peace, gave him ‘the greatest amount of gratification that can be compressed into three weeks.’
Since 1800 Wollaston had suffered occasionally from partial blindness in both eyes (see infra). Towards the end of 1827 he was attacked by numbness in the left arm, and in July 1828 the left pupil became insensible. He explained his symptoms to a medical friend as if they were those of another person, and on hearing that they probably signified tumour of the brain, with an early termination, he set about dictating papers on all his still unrecorded work, many of these being published posthumously. He had experiments carried on under his direction in a room adjoining his sick-room ‘for many days previous to his death,’ which took place on 22 Dec. 1828 at his house, No. 1 Dorset Street. Wollaston was buried at Chislehurst. His house was afterwards inhabited by his friend Charles Babbage [q. v.] His manuscript papers passed to Henry Warburton, who intended to use them for a memoir; after Warburton's death they went to Mrs. Somerville, but on her death they could not be found.
