Owen Jones was described in the Builder for 1874 as “the most potent apostle of colour that architectural England has had in these days.” His range of activity is to be traced in his works: Plans, Elevations and Details of the Alhambra (1835-1845), in which he was assisted by MM. Goury and Gayangos; Designs for Mosaic and Tesselated Pavements (1842); Polychromatic Ornament of Italy (1845); An Attempt to Define the Principles which regulate the Employment of Colour in Decorative Arts (1852); Handbook to the Alhambra Court (1854); Grammar of Ornament (1856), a very important work; One Thousand and One Initial Letters (1864); Seven Hundred and Two Monograms (1864); and Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867).
JONES, RICHARD (1790-1855), English economist, was born at Tunbridge Wells. The son of a solicitor, he was intended for the legal profession, and was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. Owing to ill-health, he abandoned the idea of the law and took orders soon after leaving Cambridge. For several years he held curacies in Sussex and Kent. In 1833 he was appointed professor of political economy at King’s College, London, resigning this post in 1835 to succeed T. R. Malthus in the chair of political economy and history at the East India College at Haileybury. He took an active part in the commutation of tithes in 1836 and showed great ability as a tithe commissioner, an office which he filled till 1851. He was for some time, also, a charity commissioner. He died at Haileybury, shortly after he had resigned his professorship, on the 26th of January 1855. In 1831 Jones published his Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation, his most important work. In it he showed himself a thorough-going critic of the Ricardian system.
Jones’s method is inductive; his conclusions are founded on a wide observation of contemporary facts, aided by the study of history. The world he professed to study was not an imaginary world, inhabited by abstract “economic men,” but the real world with the different forms which the ownership and cultivation of land, and, in general, the conditions of production and distribution, assume at different times and places. His recognition of such different systems of life in communities occupying different stages in the progress of civilization led to his proposal of what he called a “political economy of nations.” This was a protest against the practice of taking the exceptional state of facts which exists, and is indeed only partially realized, in a small corner of our planet as representing the uniform type of human societies, and ignoring the effects of the early history and special development of each community as influencing its economic phenomena. Jones is remarkable for his freedom from exaggeration and one-sided statement; thus, whilst holding Malthus in, perhaps, undue esteem, he declines to accept the proposition that an increase of the means of subsistence is necessarily followed by an increase of population; and he maintains what is undoubtedly true, that with the growth of population, in all well-governed and prosperous states, the command over food, instead of diminishing, increases.
A collected edition of Jones’s works, with a preface by W. Whewell, was published in 1859.
JONES, THOMAS RUPERT (1819- ), English geologist and palaeontologist, was born in London on the 1st of October 1819. While at a private school at Ilminster, his attention was attracted to geology by the fossils that are so abundant in the Lias quarries. In 1835 he was apprenticed to a surgeon at Taunton, and he completed his apprenticeship in 1842 at Newbury in Berkshire. He was then engaged in practice mainly in London, till in 1849 he was appointed assistant secretary to the Geological Society of London. In 1862 he was made professor of geology at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Having devoted his especial attention to fossil microzoa, he now became the highest authority in England on the Foraminifera and Entomostraca. He edited the 2nd edition of Mantell’s Medals of Creation (1854), the 3rd edition of Mantell’s Geological Excursions round the Isle of Wight (1854), and the 7th edition of Mantell’s Wonders of Geology (1857); he also edited the 2nd edition of Dixon’s Geology of Sussex (1878). He was elected F.R.S. in 1872 and was awarded the Lyell medal by the Geological Society in 1890. For many years he was specially interested in the geology of South Africa.
His publications include A Monograph of the Entomostraca of the Cretaceous Formation of England (Palaeontograph. Soc., 1849); A Monograph of the Tertiary Entomostraca of England (ibid. 1857); A Monograph of the Fossil Estheriae (ibid. 1862); A Monograph of the Foraminifera of the Crag (ibid. 1866, &c., with H. B. Brady); and numerous articles in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, the Geological Magazine, the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, and other journals.
JONES, WILLIAM (1726-1800), English divine, was born at Lowick, in Northamptonshire on the 30th of July 1726. He was descended from an old Welsh family and one of his progenitors was Colonel John Jones, brother-in-law of Cromwell. He was educated at Charterhouse School, and at University College, Oxford. There a kindred taste for music, as well as a similarity in regard to other points of character, led to his close intimacy with George Horne (q.v.), afterwards bishop of Norwich, whom he induced to study Hutchinsonian doctrines. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree in 1749, Jones held various preferments. In 1777 he obtained the perpetual curacy of Nayland, Suffolk, and on Horne’s appointment to Norwich became his chaplain, afterwards writing his life. His vicarage became the centre of a High Church coterie, and Jones himself was a link between the non-jurors and the Oxford movement. He could write intelligibly on abstruse topics. He died on the 6th of January 1800.