John Gough (natural philosopher)

In 1778 at the age of twenty-one, Gough became a resident pupil of John Slee, a mathematical master at Mungrisdale, Cumberland.

"[2] In 1800 at the parish church of Kendal, Gough married Mary (died 1858), daughter of Thomas Harrison of Crosthwaite, Cumberland.

In 1812 Gough had a house, which he named Fowl Ing, built for himself and his family on the south-west slope of Benson Knot, a hill 2 miles north-east of Kendal.

At about the same time he began to act as a private tutor of mathematics to a select group of pupils from northern England, whom he prepared for university.

A number of them went on to achieve high distinction in the mathematical tripos, and subsequently in the hierarchies of university and church.

Gough's most substantive enquiry was "An investigation of the method whereby men judge by the ear of the position of sonorous bodies relative to their own persons", which appeared in 1802 during an ongoing controversy with another former Quaker, the noted natural philosopher Thomas Young, over the nature of compound sounds.

He had developed the skill of using his upper lip to identify plants by touch, and reported the hydrosere succession as freshwater lakes dry out and become land.

[7][8] Gough's autobiography, transcribed and annotated by Michael Pearson and Ian D. Hodkinson, was published in 2021 by the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society with the title The Dark Path to Knowledge.