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Hoskins
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Hoskins

went to Guernsey and, marrying Miss Elizabeth Oliver, remained there during the remainder of his life. The son was educated at Topsham and Exeter, and being destined for the Guernsey bar was placed under Advocate Charles de Jersey, but after a year's probation the law was discarded for medicine. From 1818 to 1820 he was at the united hospitals of Guy's and St. Thomas's, London. He passed as a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1821, as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1822, as an extra licentiate of the College of Physicians in 1834, and a fellow in 1859. While a student he came to know Astley Cooper, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Talfourd, and Douglas Jerrold. After passing his surgical examination he returned to Guernsey and entered into partnership with his old instructor, Dr. Brock. He studied for a short time in Paris in 1827, and settled finally in the Channel Islands.

Soon after settling down he elaborated a chart of stethoscopic signs, and carried out an investigation into the solubility of calculi within the body. The former work was favourably reviewed, and passed into a second edition. The latter occupied many years of his life. His results presented to the Royal Society (Phil. Trans. 1843, pt. i. pp. 7–16) gained his election to a fellowship on 25 May 1843. His observations on the climatology of Guernsey were at the time unique. His paper on the origin and progress of cholera and small-pox in 1849 was written at the request of the Epidemiological Society. In 1859 he retired from his profession, leaving his practice in the hands of a partner, and devoted himself to historical research. He died at York Place, Candie Road, Guernsey, on 12 Oct. 1888, and was buried in the Candie cemetery. He married in 1830 Harriet Rowley, daughter of Thomas and Harriet Le Merchant MacCulloch, and sister of Sir Edward MacCulloch, bailiff of Guernsey. She died at Guernsey on 12 March 1889. Their only son, Edgar Hoskins, is rector of St. Mary Magdalen with St. Gregory by St. Paul, London. Hoskins published:

  1. ‘A Stethoscopic Chart, in which may be seen at one View the Application of Auscultation and Percussion to the Diagnosis of Thoracic Disease,’ 1830.
  2. ‘On the Chemical Discrimination of Vesical Calculi,’ a translation of Scharling's work, 1842.
  3. ‘Tables of Corrections for Temperature to Barometric Observations,’ 1842.
  4. ‘Report on Cholera and Small-pox. By S. E. Hoskins and Thomas L. Mansell,’ 1850.
  5. ‘Home Resorts for Invalids in the Climate of Guernsey,’ 1852.
  6. ‘Louis le Grand, or Fontainbleau and Versailles, a Comedy in three Acts,’ 1852.
  7. ‘Charles the Second in the Channel Islands,’ 1854, 2 vols.
  8. ‘Relations de la Normandie et de la Bretagne avec les îles de la Manche pendant l'émigration, d'après des documents recueillis par S. E. Hoskins. Par Charles Hettier,’ 1885.

He also published papers on ‘The Carved Oak Chests of the Channel Islands,’ and ‘The Outposts of England.’

[Times, 19 Oct. 1888, p. 5; Lancet, 20 Oct. 1888, p. 797, and 27 Oct. p. 845; British Medical Journal, 27 Oct. 1888, p. 969; Proc. Royal Soc. Nov. 1888, p. 47.]

G. C. B.

HOSKYNS, CHANDOS WREN- (1812–1876), writer on agriculture, born on 15 Feb. 1812, was second son of Sir Hungerford Hoskyns (1776–1862), seventh baronet, of Harewood, Herefordshire. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was entered on 7 July 1829; obtained a second class in classics in 1834, and soon afterwards became a student of the Inner Temple. Although called to the bar in 1838, he did not long take an active part in his profession, as his marriage on 20 April 1837 with Theodosia Anna, daughter and heiress of Christopher R. Wren (the representative and descendant of the great architect), entailed on him the charge of a considerable landed estate. He assumed the additional surname of Wren by royal license on 15 April 1837. He settled down on this property—Wroxall Abbey, Warwickshire—and there acquired a very practical knowledge of agriculture. To the ‘Agricultural Gazette’ from the very outset (1844) until a late period Hoskyns was a frequent contributor, and in the early volumes first appeared his ‘Anomalies of Agriculture,’ and his well-known ‘Chronicles of a Clay Farm.’ In the same journal he wrote a series of papers under the head of ‘Tales of a Landlord,’ in which the relations of landlord to property, tenant, and labourer, were fairly discussed. For nearly twenty years his pen was actively employed in advocating such a reform in the tenure of land as would give all concerned in it a justly proportionate interest. In 1849 he delivered a course of lectures at the Manchester Athenæum on the ‘History of Agriculture,’ displaying in them the same power of interesting his audience as had already made his writings popular. Hoskyns contributed the introductory essay and the papers on education and the landlord to the ‘Cyclopædia of Agriculture,’ and was the author of several important essays in the ‘Journal of the English Agricultural Society.’ He was at the same time a diligent student of general