John, an English mathematician and philosopher of considerable ingenuity, was fellow of Magdalen college, Cambridge, and afterwards rector of Andover in Lincolnshire, in the gift of that society. He constantly attended the meetings of the Spalding society, and was a man of an extraordinary philosophical habit and turn of mind, while at the same time his dispositions were social and cheerful. His genius was peculiarly fitted for mechanical contrivances or inventions. He published a compendious system of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, in the year 1738, in two vols. 8vo.; a work of much ingenuity, which has gone through several editions. He likewise inserted two pieces in the Philosophical Transactions, viz. a description of a barometer, wherein the scale of variation may be increased at pleasure; vol. xxxviii. p. 39.; and directions for making a machine for finding the roots of equations universally, together with the manner in which it is to be used; vol. lx. p. 240.

He died at his lodgings in Carey street, near Lincoln's- Roxburghshire, in the end of November 1771, at 72 years of age. Though a man both ingenious and pleasant, his external appearance was rather forbidding, as he was tall, hopped in the shoulders, and his countenance was down-looking and froward.