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Person Code
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DS/UK/25693
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Forenames
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James
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Surname
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Bonar
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Dates
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1757-1821
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Epithet
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Solicitor of Excise and Greek scholar
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Activity
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He was born on 29 September 1757, the eighth son of the ten children of John Bonar, minister of Cockpen and Perth, and Christian Currier. He was educated at Edinburgh High School and at the University of Edinburgh and entered the office of the solicitor of excise where his elder brother John Bonar was employed; John later became the first solicitor of excise in Scotland. James is better known for his scholarship. On 9 December 1777 he was admitted as a member of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh University (of which John Bonar was a co-founder) and was elected an extraordinary member on 24 December 1781. For several years he was treasurer of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was one of the original promoters of the Astronomical Institution, and a founder of the Edinburgh Subscription Library in 1794. In March 1797 he married Marjory Maitland (d. 1854), daughter of James Pyott, bailie of Montrose.
Bonar contributed the article ?Posts? in Encyclopaedia Britannica (1794) and the entries, among others, ?Alphabet characters?, ?Etymology?, ?Excise?, and ?Hieroglyphics?, for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808?18). He wrote Disquisition on the Origin and Radical Sense of the Greek Prepositions (1804), edited a new edition of Ewing's Greek Grammar, and published an English edition of Hans Holbein's The Dance of Death in 1788. A regular contributor to the Edinburgh Magazine, Missionary Magazine, and Scottish Register in the period 1790?95, Bonar also wrote the memoir of his brother Archibald Bonar (1753?1816), which is prefixed to the second volume of the latter's Sermons, Chiefly on Devotional Subjects (1815?17). James Bonar died on 25 March 1821. He was survived by his wife and eight children including John James Bonar (1803?1891), Horatius Bonar (1808?1889), and Andrew Alexander Bonar (1810?1892).
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