| | 1 | Name: | Charles Adams | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 2 | Name: | Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 3 | Name: | Marquis de M.J.A.N. Caritat Condorcet | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 4 | Name: | Louis J.M. Daubenton | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1716 | | | | |
| 5 | Name: | Fortunatus Dwarris | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 6 | Name: | Thomas Gibbons | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 5/31/1720 | | | Death Date: | 2/22/1785 | | | | | | |
Thomas Gibbons (31 May 1720–22 February 1785) was a minister and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1775. Born in Suffolk County, England to an Independant minister and his wife, Gibbons was brought up in the English dissenter community, which separated themselves from the Church of England. Sent to grammar school and then the dissenting academy at Deptford, he was ordained in 1743 as minister of the Independent church at Haberdashers’ Hall. The next year the Congregational Fund and the King’s Head Society elected him tutor in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric at the Mile End dissenting academy. He began lecturing at various institutions, such as the meeting-house at Monkwell, Pinner’s Hall, and Little St. Helen’s. He earned his M.A. in 1760 after raising funds for the College of New Jersey, and his D.D. in 1764 from Aberdeen University. Gibbons was an influential member of the evangelical dissent movement of the eighteenth century and a leader of the London Independent Ministers. He campaigned to dissolve the legal obligation dissenting ministers faced to follow the Thirty-Nine Articles. Gibbons was also a good friend of Isaac Watts, famed hymn-writer and fellow dissenter, and composed Watt’s first biography. He wrote forty-four other publications, mainly sermons and religious verse. His diary offers a glimpse into the life of an industrious eighteenth-century minister, constantly attending banquets and transacting business. He lived like this until suffering a stroke in his local coffeehouse and dying in his home five days thereafter. (DNB) | |
| 7 | Name: | Samuel Holland | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1728 | | | Death Date: | 12/28/1801 | | | | | | |
Samuel Johannes Holland (1728–28 December 1801) was a military engineer, surveyor, politician, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1775. Born in Nijmegen, Netherlands, Holland entered the Dutch Artillery in 1745, fighting in the War of Austrian Succession. By 1756 he had moved to England, received a commission as lieutenant in the Royal Americans, and surveyed in New York province. The accurate map he produced earned him a promotion to captain lieutenant (1757), and he began surveying and engineering while also fighting alongside Brigadier General James-Wolfe. Holland became a captain in 1759 and continued to serve under General Wolfe until he returned to his surveying duties. In 1764 he became surveyor general of the Northern District of North America, and his first assignment was to chart British holdings north of the Potomac River. Holland earned renown for his accuracy: fixing latitude and longitude using astronomical calculations, he divided territories with precisionHolland leveraged his surveys to take possession of land, which he then capitalized on by leasing it to the farmers who settled therein. By 1767 he became established in Quebec, sitting on committees regarding land, roads, and public works. In 1770 he began the massive undertaking of mapping the Atlantic Coastal Lands down to New York City. Using the latest astronomical instruments, he produced the first accurate map of New Hampshire (1770), served on the New York–New Jersey boundary commission (1769-1770), and settled a border dispute between New York and Pennsylvania (1774). From these endeavors he obtained thousands of acres in New Hampshire and Vermont, which he lost after rejecting offers to join the American revolutionaries and fleeing to England at the outbreak of war. He returned in 1776, serving under a Hessian commander. Two years later, he left to resume surveyor general duties back in Quebec, joining the legislative council there in 1779. He continued surveying Canadian lands until his health began to fail. He suffered from an attack of palsy in 1790, withdrew from public life, relinquished his surveyor general duties, and died in 1801.
While this is most likely the Samuel Holland elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1775, there was another Samuel Holland, who was a business partner of Benjamin Franklin. He spent a few years in the 1750’s printing English and German literature and a newspaper in Lancaster, to little success, but under Franklin’s charge. There is also Samuel Verbruyk, a dutch reformed pastor from New Jersey who this might have been.
Works Cited
F. J. Thorpe, “HOLLAND, SAMUEL JOHANNES,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 5, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/holland_samuel_johannes_5E.html
Frasca, Ralph. 2006. Benjamin Franklin's printing network: disseminating virtue in early America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10128980. (for the addendum on Samuel Holland of Lancaster) | |
| 8 | Name: | Antoine L. Lavoisier | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 8/26/1743 | | | Death Date: | 5/8/1794 | | | | | | |
Antoine L. Lavoisier (26 August 1743–8 May 1794) was a chemist and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1775. Born to a wealthy family in Paris, Lavoisier pursued an education in the law as a young man and was admitted to the Order of Barristers, but attended lectures on natural philosophy in his spare time. His inherited wealth supported his study of chemistry: he was able to afford the equipment and time to perform and repeat experiments in an effort to prove his chemical theories. His notable contributions to the field included his experimental attempts to demonstrate the conservation of mass during chemical reactions and, in 1774, the isolation and naming of the element oxygen. In 1787, Lavoisier and a few of his colleagues created a new nomenclature of chemistry, giving the burgeoning field a common vocabulary. In 1768, Lavoisier joined France’s foremost society of natural philosophy, the Academy of Sciences. In 1771, Antoine married Marie-Anne Paulze, who was just fourteen years old. The two became scientific collaborators, and Marie-Anne worked alongside her husband in the laboratory—taking notes, recording results, and translating his work into English. Lavoisier was also involved in politics throughout his life: he worked as a tax collector, a director in France’s Gunpowder Administration, and a financial advisor to the government. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Lavoisier hoped that the upheaval would usher in a new government ruled by reason, and he advocated for the preservation of scientific institutions like the Academy of Sciences. However, Lavoisier’s bourgeois upbringing and his work as a “tax farmer” made him a target of radical revolutionaries. He was imprisoned and executed at the guillotine on May 8th, 1794. (EB) | |
| 9 | Name: | Pierre J. Macquer | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 10 | Name: | Benjamin Moseley | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1742 | | | Death Date: | 9/25/1819 | | | | | | |
Benjamin Moseley (1742–25 September 1819) was a physician and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1775. Born in Essex, Moseley received his medical training in Paris and London and began his practice in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1768. During his sixteen years there, he studied and published pamphlets on diseases he encountered, like dysentery, and on the medicinal and agricultural effects of the island’s consumable crops, like coffee and sugar. His practice during this time was profitable, and upon his return to Britain in 1784 he had enough money to travel across Europe and to obtain more medical training, earning an M.D. from St. Andrews University. In 1788, he began a medical practice catering to wealthy patients in London and became a physician to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. He was an early opponent of the new practice of vaccination. Beginning in 1799, in pamphlets and journal articles, he expressed doubt as to the efficacy of using doses of cowpox to protect patients from becoming ill with smallpox and outrage at his medical colleagues for adopting the new practice so quickly. He put forth theories that that vaccinations would have horrible side-effects, including physical ailments like whooping cough and intellectual afflictions like insanity. Some of his warnings were based on the fears of other objectors to vaccination; others were original to him. Moseley expressed his views before Parliament during investigations into the practice in 1802 and 1808. His outlandish theories were the basis for a satirical cartoon by James Gillray called “The Cow Pock” which portrayed small cows bursting out of human bodies. Moseley died in Southend, a favorite summer vacation spot, in 1819. (DNB) | |
| 11 | Name: | Guillaume T. F. Raynall | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1716 | | | | |
| 12 | Name: | Le Roux | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1724 | | | | |
| 13 | Name: | Jean F. Rozier | | | Year Elected: | 1775 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1734 | | | | |
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