without ever having been observed in Kamchatka, Japan or China, though it is a summer resident in the Tchuktchi peninsula. Hence it would seem as though its annual flights across Bering's Strait must be in connexion with a migratory movement that passes to the north and west of the Stanovoi range of mountains.
Many species more or less allied to the wheatear have been described. Some eight are included in the European fauna; but the majority are inhabitants of Africa. Several of them are birds of the desert; and here it may be remarked that, while most of these exhibit the sand-coloured tints so commonly found in animals of like habitat, a few assume a black plumage, which, as explained by H. B. Tristram, is equally protective, since it assimilates them to the deep shadows cast by projecting stones and other inequalities of the surface.
Amongst genera closely allied to Saxicola are Pratincola, which comprises among others two well-known British birds, the stonechat and whinchat, P. rubicola and P. rubetra, the latter a summer-migrant, while the former is resident as a species, and the black head, ruddy breast, and white collar and wing-spot of the cock render him a conspicuous object on almost every furze-grown common or heath in the British Islands, as he sits on a projecting twig or flits from bush to bush. This bird has a wide range in Europe, and several other species, more or less resembling it, inhabit South Africa, Madagascar, Réunion and Asia, from some of the islands of the Indian Archipelago to Japan. The whinchat, on the other hand, much more affects enclosed lands, and with a wide range has no very near ally. The wheatear and its allies belong to the sub-family Turnidae of the thrushes (q.v.). (A. N.)
WHEATLEY, FRANCIS (1747–1801), English portrait and landscape painter, was born in 1747 at Wild Court, Covent Garden, London. He studied at Shipley's drawing-school and the Royal Academy, and won several prizes from the Society of Arts. He assisted in the decoration of Vauxhall, and aided Mortimer in painting a ceiling for Lord Melbourne at Brocket Hall (Hertfordshire). In youth his life was irregular and dissipated. He eloped to Ireland with the wife of Gresse, a brother artist, and established himself in Dublin as a portrait-painter, executing, among other works, an interior of the Irish House of Commons. His scene from the London Riots of 1780 was admirably engraved by Heath. He painted several subjects for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, designed illustrations to Bell's edition of the poets, and practised to some small extent as an etcher and mezzotint-engraver. It is, however, as a painter, in both oil and water-colour, of landscapes and rustic subjects that Wheatley is best remembered. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1790, and an academician in the following year. He died on the 28th of June 1801. His wife, afterwards Mrs Pope, was known as a painter of flowers and portraits.
WHEATON, HENRY (1785-1848), American lawyer and diplomatist, was born at Providence, Rhode Island, on the 27th of November 1785. He graduated at Brown University in 1802, was admitted to the bar in 1805, and, after two years' study abroad, practised law at Providence (1807-1812) and at New York City (1812-1827). He was a justice of the Marine Court of the city of New York from 1815 to 1819, and reporter of the United States Supreme Court from 1816 to 1827, aiding in 1825 in the revision of the laws of New York. His diplomatic career began in 1827, with an appointment to Denmark as chargé d'affaires, followed by that of minister to Prussia, 1837 to 1846. During this period he had published a Digest of the Law of Maritime Captures (1815); twelve volumes of Supreme Court Reports, and a Digest; a great number of historical articles, and some collected works; Elements of International Law (1836), his most important work, of which a 6th edition with memoir was prepared by W. B. Lawrence and an eighth by R. H. Dana (q.v.); Histoire du Progrès du Droit des Gens en Europe, written in 1838 for a prize offered by the French Academy of Moral and Political Science, and translated in 1845 by William B. Lawrence as A History of the Law of Nations in Europe and America; and the Right of Visitation and Search (1842). The History took rank at once as one of the leading works on the subject of which it treats. Wheaton's general theory is that international law consists of "those rules of conduct which reason deduces, as consonant to justice, from the nature of the society existing among independent nations, with such definitions and modifications as may be established by general consent." In 1846 Wheaton was requested to resign by the new president, Polk, who needed his place for another appointment. The request provoked general condemnation; but Wheaton resigned and returned to the United States. He was called at once to the Harvard Law School as lecturer on international law; but he died at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on the 11th of March 1848.
WHEATSTONE, SIR CHARLES (1802-1875), English physicist and the practical founder of modern telegraphy, was born at Gloucester in February 1802, his father being a music-seller in that city. In 1806 the family removed to London. Wheatstone's education was carried on in several private schools, at which he appears to have displayed no remarkable attainments, being mainly characterized by a morbid shyness and sensitiveness that prevented him from making friends. About 1816 he was sent to his uncle, a musical instrument maker in the Strand, to learn the trade; but with his father's countenance he spent more time in reading books of all kinds than at work. For some years he continued making experiments in acoustics, following out his own ideas and devising many beautiful and ingenious arrangements. Of these the "acoucryptophone" was one of the most elegant—a light box, shaped like an ancient lyre and suspended by a metallic wire from a piano in the room above. When the instrument was played, the vibrations were transmitted silently, and became audible in the lyre, which thus appeared to play of itself. On the death of his uncle in 1823 Wheatstone and his brother succeeded to the business; but he never seems to have taken a very active part in it, and he virtually retired after six years, devoting himself to experimental research, at first chiefly with regard to sound. Although he occasionally read a paper to scientific societies when a young man, he never could become a lecturer on account of his shyness. Hence many of his investigations were first described by Faraday in his Friday evening discourses at the Royal Institution. By 1834 his originality and resource in experiment were fully recognized, and he was appointed professor of experimental philosophy at King's College, London, in that year. This appointment was inaugurated by two events,—a course of eight lectures on sound, which proved no success and was not repeated, and the determination by means of a revolving mirror of the speed of electric discharge in conductors, a piece of work leading to enormously important results. The great velocity of electrical transmission suggested the possibility of utilizing it for sending messages; and, after many experiments and the practical advice and business-like co-operation of William Fothergill Cooke (1806-1879), a patent for an electric telegraph was taken out in their joint names in 1837. Wheatstone's early training in making musical instruments now bore rich fruit in the continuous designing of new instruments and pieces of mechanism. His life was uneventful except in so far as the variety of his work lent it colour. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1837; in 1847 he married; and in 1868, after the completion of his masterpiece, the automatic telegraph, he was knighted. While in Paris perfecting a receiving instrument for submarine cables, Sir Charles Wheatstone caught cold, and died on the 19th of October 1875.
Wheatstone's physical investigations are described in more than thirty-six papers in various scientific journals, the more important being in the Philosophical Transactions, the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the Comptes rendus and the British Association Reports. They naturally divide themselves into researches on sound, light and electricity, but extend into other branches of physics as well. But his best work by far was in the invention of complicated and delicate mechanism for various purposes, in the construction of which he employed a staff of workmen trained to the highest degree of excellence. For his insight into mechanism and his power over it he was unequalled, except perhaps by Charles Babbage. A cryptographic machine, which changed the cipher automatically and printed a message, entirely unintelligible until translated by a duplicate instrument, was one of the most perfect examples of this. Cryptography had a great fascination for Wheatstone; he studied it deeply at one time, and deciphered many of the MSS. in the British Museum which had defied all other interpreters. In acoustics his principal work was a research on the transmission of sound through solids, the explanation of Chladni's figures of vibrating solids, various investigations of the principles of acoustics and the mechanism of hearing, and the invention of new musical instruments, e.g. the concertina (q.v.).
