in the first exhibition of the Liverpool Academy, of which body he was a member. In the subsequent exhibitions of that body, as well as at the first exhibition of the Royal Manchester Institution in 1827 and the annual exhibitions that followed each year, he was represented by a large number of landscapes and seascapes. His only exhibit on the walls of the Royal Academy was a landscape in 1811. He earned a considerable reputation as a painter of seapieces and landscapes, and was highly esteemed by his fellow-townsmen. On his death, which took place on 7 June 1840, an obelisk to his memory was erected in the St. James's cemetery, a lithograph of which, by W. Collingwood, was published. His pictures are well composed, and are painted with an attractive charm of light and colour. There are three works by him at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and many more in private collections in the district.
[Graves's Dict. of Artists; Exhibition Catalogues; information from Robert Williamson of Ripon; note in Manchester City News, 7 Sept. 1878, by the present writer.]
WILLIAMSON, WILLIAM CRAWFORD (1816–1895), naturalist, born at Scarborough on 24 Nov. 1816, was the second and only surviving son of John Williamson, gardener and naturalist, first curator of the Scarborough Museum, by Elizabeth Crawford, eldest daughter of a Scottish lapidary and watchmaker, who migrated to Yorkshire when young. In his early boyhood he learned the lapidary's art in Crawford's workshop, and acquired a good knowledge of field natural history from his father and his father's friends, notably William Smith (1769–1839) [q. v.], the founder of modern stratigraphical geology, and his nephew John Phillips (1800–1874) [q. v.], professor of geology at Oxford, who was for some time an inmate of John Williamson's house. His schooling, begun early, was inadequate, largely owing to delicate health. Between three and six years of age he went to three dame schools; in 1822 he went to William Potter's school, where he had meagre instruction in Latin and English. In 1831 he had his only real teaching, from the Rev. Thomas Irving at Thornton grammar school, where he stayed only six months. In the autumn he went for six months to the school of a M. Montieus at Bourbourg, near Calais, with little intellectual profit, even in the acquisition of French, for the majority of the boys were English. This completed his school life: he never acquired ease in French speaking, though he read the language with ease, nor the knowledge of any other modern tongue. He was apprenticed as a medical student (1832) to Thomas Weddell, apothecary of Scarborough, where he discharged the functions of errand boy, dispenser, and clerk, according to the general custom. He continued his natural history studies, and contributed a paper on birds to the Zoological Society, and two to the Geological. These were among the first pioneering attempts to analyse the strata into smaller ‘zones’ characterised by their own proper groups of fossils, a field in which enormous advances have since been made. He also published a pamphlet, since twice reprinted, giving an account of the contents of a tumulus opened at Gristhorpe, and described a new mussel (Mag. Nat. Hist. 1834). To the ‘Fossil Flora of Great Britain,’ by John Lindley [q. v.] and James Hutton (1726–1797) [q. v.], he contributed illustrated descriptions of fossils which had been discovered in an estuarine deposit by his father and his father's cousin, Simon Bean. His work attracted the attention of many eminent naturalists, notably William Buckland [q. v.] Owing to their interest, and to that of naturalists visiting Scarborough, he received a call from the Manchester Natural History Society to the curatorship of their museum in 1835, Weddell generously cancelling his indentures; he held this office for three years, continuing especially geological research and publication, and was a frequent visitor at the Literary and Philosophical Society, where he met among others John Dalton (1766–1844) [q. v.] In the summer of 1838, in order to raise funds for medical study, he gave a course of six lectures on geology in various towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Durham; he studied one winter at the Pine Street medical school, Manchester, and entered in the autumn of 1839 at University College, London. In 1840 he attended a second course of lectures there; but before the close of the year had obtained the diplomas of M.R.C.S. and L.S.A., and in January 1841 commenced practice in Manchester with the generous guarantee of two wealthy friends. Some successful operations on squint brought him into note, and he was soon appointed surgeon to the Chorlton-on-Medlock dispensary, a post he resigned in 1868. Ear troubles during his student days had interested him in that organ; he profited by some vacations to study aural surgery under Menière in Paris, Joseph Toynbee [q. v.] and Harvey in London, took active steps towards the creation of the Manchester Institute for Diseases of the Ear in 1855, and was surgeon to it until 1870, when he became its consulting sur-
