house near Farnham was plundered, and he himself was captured by a troop of Royalist horse, owing his life to the intervention of Sir John Denham on the ground that so long as Wither lived he himself could not be accounted the worst poet in England. After this episode he was promoted to the rank of major. He was present at the siege of Gloucester (1643) and at Naseby (1645). He had been deprived in 1643 of his nominal command, and of his commission as justice of the peace, in consequence of an attack upon Sir Richard Onslow, who was, he maintained, responsible for the Farnham disaster. In the same year parliament made him a grant of £2000 for the loss of his property, but he apparently never received the full amount, and complained from time to time of his embarrassments and of the slight rewards he received for his services. An order was made to settle a yearly income of £150 on Wither, chargeable on Sir John Denham's sequestrated estate, but there is no evidence that he ever received it. A small place given him by the Protector was forfeited “by declaring unto him (Cromwell) those truths which he was not willing to hear of.” At the Restoration he was arrested, and remained in prison for three years. He died in London on the 2nd of May 1667.
His extant writings, catalogued in Park's British Bibliographer, number over a hundred. Sir S. E. Brydges published The Shepherd's Hunting (1814), Fidelia (1815) and Fair Virtue (1818), and a selection appeared in Stanford's Works of the British Poets, vol. v. (1819). Most of Wither's works were edited in twenty volumes for the Spenser Society (1871-1882); a selection was included by Henry Morley in his Companion Poets (1891); Fidelia and Fair Virtue are included in Edward Arber's English Garner (vol. iv., 1882; vol. vi. 1883), and an excellent edition of The Poetry of George Wither was edited by F. Sidgwick in 1902. Among A. C. Swinburne's Miscellanies there is an amusing account of a copy of a selection from Wither's poems annotated by Lamb, then by Dr Nott, whose notes were the subject of further ruthless comment from Lamb.
WITHERITE, a mineral consisting of barium carbonate (BaCO3), crystallizing in the orthorhombic system. The crystals are invariably twinned together in groups of three, giving rise to pseudo-hexagonal forms somewhat resembling bipyramidal crystals of quartz, the faces are usually rough and striated horizontally. The colour is dull white or sometimes greyish, the hardness is 3½ and the specific gravity 4.3. The mineral is named after W. Withering, who in 1784 recognized it to be chemically distinct from barytes. It occurs in veins of lead ore at Hexham in Northumberland, Alston in Cumberland, Anglezark, near Chorley in Lancashire, and a few other localities. Witherite is readily altered to barium sulphate by the action of water containing calcium sulphate in solution, and crystals are therefore frequently encrusted with barytes. It is the chief source of barium salts, and is mined in considerable amounts in Northumberland. It is used for the preparation of rat poison, in the manufacture of glass and porcelain, and formerly for refining sugar. (L. J. S.)
WITHERSPOON, JOHN (1723-1794), Scottish-American divine and educationalist, was born at Gifford, Yester parish, East Lothian, Scotland, on the 5th of February 1722/1723, the son of a minister of the Scotch Established Church, James Witherspoon (d. 1759), and a descendant on the distaff side from John Welch and John Knox. He studied at Haddington, and graduated in 1739 at the university of Edinburgh, where he completed a divinity course in 1743. He was licensed to preach by the Haddington presbytery in 1743, and after two years as a probationer was ordained (1745) minister of the parish of Beith. His Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753), Serious Apology (1764), and History of a Corporation of Servants discovered a few years ago in the Interior Parts of South America (1765), attacked various abuses in the church and satirized the “moderate” party. In 1757 he had become pastor at Paisley; and in 1769 he received the degree of D.D. from Aberdeen. He was sued for libel for printing a rebuke to some of his parishioners who had travestied the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; and after several years in the courts he was ordered to pay damages of £150, which was raised by his parishioners. He refused calls to churches in Dublin and Rotterdam, and in 1766 declined an invitation brought him by Richard Stockton to go to America as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University); but he accepted a second invitation and left Paisley in May 1768. His close relation with the Scotch Church secured important material assistance for the college of which he now became president, and he toured New England to collect contributions. He secured an excellent set of scientific apparatus and improved the instruction in the natural sciences; he introduced courses in Hebrew and French about 1772; and he did a large part of the actual teaching, having courses in languages, divinity, moral philosophy and eloquence. In the American Presbyterian church he was a prominent figure; he worked for union with the Congregationalists and with the Dutch Reformed body; and at the synod of 1786 he was one of the committee which reported in favour of the formation of a General Assembly and which drafted “a system of general rules for … government.” In politics he did much to influence Irish and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians to support the Whig party. He was a member of the provincial congress which met at New Brunswick in July 1774; presided over the Somerset county committee of correspondence in 1774-1775; was a member of the New Jersey constitutional convention in the spring of 1776; and from June 1776 to the autumn of 1779 and in 1780-1783 he was a member of the Continental Congress, where he urged the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, being the only clergyman to sign it. He became a member of the secret committee of correspondence in October 1776, of the Board of War in October 1777, and of the committee on finance in 1778. He opposed the issue of paper money, supported Robert Morris's plan for a national bank, and was prominently connected with all Congressional action in regard to the peace with Great Britain. He had lost the sight of one eye in 1784, and in 1791 became quite blind. He died on his farm, Tusculum, near Princeton, on the 15th of November 1794.
There is a statue of Witherspoon in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, and another on the University Library at Princeton. His Essay on the Connexion between the Doctrine of Justification by the Imputed Righteousness of Christ and Holiness of Life (1756) was his principal theological work. He also published several sermons, and Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774), sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin. His collected works, with a memoir by his son-in-law, Samuel Stanhope Smith (who succeeded him as president of the college), were edited by Dr Ashbel Green (New York, 1801-1802). See also David Walker Woods, John Witherspoon (New York, 1906); and M. C. Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution, vol. ii. (1897).
WITNESS (from O. Eng. witan, to know), in law, a person who is able from his knowledge or experience to make statements relevant to matters of fact in dispute in a court of justice. The relevancy and probative effect of the statements which he makes belong to the law of evidence (q.v.). In the present article it is only proposed to deal with matters concerning the position of the witness himself. In England, in the earlier stages of the common law, the jurors seem to have been the witnesses, for they were originally chosen for their knowledge or presumed knowledge of the facts in dispute, and they could (and can) be challenged and excluded from the jury if related to the parties or otherwise likely to show bias (see Jury). The Scottish jurors' oath contains the words “and no truth conceal,” an obvious survival from the time when a juror was a witness.
Modern views as to the persons competent to give evidence are very different from those of Roman law and the systems derived Competency. from it. In Roman law the testimony of many persons was not admissible without the application of torture, and a large body of possible witnesses was excluded for reasons which have now ceased to be considered expedient, and witnesses were subject to rules which have long become obsolete. Witnesses must be idonei, or duly qualified. Minors, certain heretics, infamous persons (such as women convicted of adultery), and those interested in the result of the trial were inadmissible. Parents and children could not testify against one another, nor could slaves against their masters, nor those at enmity with the party against whom their evidence was offered. Women and slaves could not act as witnesses to a will. There were also some hard and fast rules as to number. Seven witnesses were necessary for a will, five for a mancipatio or manumission, or to determine the question whether a person were free or a slave. As under Mosaic law, two witnesses were generally necessary as a minimum number to prove any fact. Unius
