[Memoir of the late Henry Booth by Robert Smiles, with letter from Professor Hodgson (1869); Supplement to Liverpool Daily Post (30 March 1869).]
BOOTH, JAMES (d. 1778), conveyancer, was born at St. Germain-en-Laye, where his father, who was a Roman catholic and a Jacobite, resided. Roman catholics being disabled by the statute 7 and 8 William III cap. 24 from practising at the bar, Booth, who adhered to the faith in which he had been educated, took out a license to practise as a conveyancer, and early acquired a considerable amount of business, owing partly to his own skill and ingenuity, and partly to the advantage which, in consequence of the various penal laws then in force, the Roman catholics of that day supposed that they derived from consulting a member of their own sect. On the death of Nathaniel Pigott, the most eminent conveyancer of his day, and also a Roman catholic, Booth succeeded to his position. His conveyances enjoyed the highest possible repute with the profession, and being often copied and used as precedents by inferior practitioners, they set the fashion in conveyancing during a great part of the last century. In one respect, however, they contrasted very unfavourably with those of his predecessor Pigott. Whereas Pigott's deeds had been models of conciseness, Booth's were remarkably prolix. He wrote no treatise on the subject, nor did he publish a collection of precedents. His knowledge of the statute of uses, however, was unique in his time. He is said to have been consulted by the Duke of Cumberland whether he could recover a legacy left him by his father, George II, the new king having torn up the will, and to have advised that 'a king of England has by the common law no power to bequeath personal property;' he is also said to have drafted George III's will. He was for some years an intimate friend of Lord Mansfield. His disposition was genial and his habits convivial. In politics he was a tory. Rather late in life he married the daughter of the titular archbishop Sharp, from whom he was subsequently separated. In his later years he suffered considerably from cataract. He died on 14 Jan. 1778.
[Butler's Hist. Mem. Eng. Ir. and Scot. Cath. (3rd ed.), iv. 360; Reminisc. (4th ed.) ii. 274; institutions considered with reference to Gent. Mag. lv. pt. i. 243, 340; Law and Lawyers, ii. 84.]
BOOTH, JAMES, LL.D. (1806–1878), mathematician and educationist, was the son of John Booth, and was born at Lava, co. Leitrim, 25 Aug. 1806. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1825, was elected scholar in 1829, graduated B.A. in 1832, M.A. in 1840, and LL.D. in 1842. In 1834 he was awarded Bishop Berkeley's gold medal for Greek. He did not succeed in obtaining a fellowship of his college, though he had a high place in the contest on several occasions. He left Ireland in 1840, and became principal of Bristol College, where he had Mr. F. W. Newman and Dr. W. B. Carpenter as colleagues. This post he retained until 1843, when he was appointed vice-principal of the Liverpool Collegiate Institution. In 1848 he gave up this office, and migrated to London. He had been ordained at Bristol in 1842, and acted there as curate till he removed to Bristol. In 1854 he was appointed minister of St. Anne's, Wandsworth, and in 1859 was presented to the vicarage of Stone, near Aylesbury, by the Royal Astronomical Society, to which society the advowson had been given in 1844 by Dr. Lee. He was also chaplain to the Marquis of Lansdowne, and justice of the peace for Buckinghamshire. He was elected F.R.S. in 1846, and F.R.A.S. in 1859. He was president of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society from 1846 to 1849, and delivered an introductory address in 1846. He contributed many mathematical papers to various societies. The titles of twenty-nine of these contributions are given in the ‘Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers.’ They were republished, with additions, in two volumes, entitled ‘A Treatise on Some New Geometrical Methods.’ The first volume, relating chiefly to tangential co-ordinates and reciprocal polars, was issued in 1873; the second, containing papers on elliptic integrals and one on conic sections, came out in 1877. His earliest separate publication seems to have been a tract ‘On the Application of a New Analytic Method to the Theory of Curves and Curved Surfaces,’ published at Dublin in 1840. Dr. Booth was the inventor of the tangential co-ordinates known as the Boothian co-ordinates, which, however, were previously introduced by Plücker in 1830 in a paper in ‘Crelle's Journal,’ though the fact was unknown to Booth when he published his own discovery. His educational writings undoubtedly exercised considerable influence in the promotion of popular education. In 1846 he published a paper on ‘Education and Educational Institutions considered with reference to the Industrial Professions and the Present Aspect of Society’ (Liverpool, 8vo, pp. 108), and in the following year another paper entitled ‘Examination the Province of the State, or the Outlines of a Practical System for the Extension of National Education’ (8vo, pp. 74). In 1852 he became a member of the Society of Arts, and at his suggestion
