John Francis Campbell

[5] Campbell was his father's heir, but creditors forced the island of Islay into administration, and the family left in 1847.

[2] He was called to the bar at the Inner Temple 1851, and appointed private secretary to George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, the Lord Privy Seal, in 1853.

He organised extensive fieldwork to collect Gaelic tales, and edited some of the resulting corpus for publication: a substantial part of the research remained unpublished at the time.

[11] He dedicated Popular Tales of the West Highlands to the Marquess of Lorne, son of George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll.

[13] In 1872 Campbell self-published Leabhar na Feinne, a collection of heroic ballads culled from manuscripts held by libraries, but to his chagrin this endeavour failed to meet with success.

After Campbell's death in 1885 the noted Gaelic scholar George Henderson contributed some translation work, provided an introduction, and completed the editing of the manuscript for its eventual publication in 1911.

During the observation of the Venus transit by the Meiji government on 9 December 1874, he superintended a theodolite on the Gotenyama Hill site in Tokyo.