James Pound

James Pound (1669–1724) was an English clergyman and astronomer.

He was the son of John Pound, of Bishop's Canning, Wiltshire, where he was born . He matriculated at St. Mary Hall, Oxford, on 16 March 1687; graduated B.A. from Hart Hall on 27 February 1694, and M.A. from Gloucester Hall in the same year; and obtained a medical diploma, with a degree of M.B., on 21 October 1697.

Having taken orders, he entered the service of the East India Company, and went out to Madras in 1699 as chaplain to the merchants of Fort St. George. whence he proceeded to the British settlement on Pulo Condore (now Côn Sơn Island) near the mouth of the Mekong River. On the morning of 3 March 1705 the Company's local troops at Pulo Condore mutinied, and only eleven of the English residents escaped in the sloop Rose to Malacca, and ultimately reached Batavia. Pound was among the refugees; but his collections and papers were destroyed.

A year after his return to England, in July 1707, Pound was presented by Sir Richard Child to the rectory of Wanstead in Essex; and the influence of Lord Chancellor Parker secured for him, in January 1720, on John Flamsteed's death, the living of Burstow in Surrey. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 30 November 1699, but his admittance was deferred until 30 July 1713. Edmund Halley communicated to the Royal Society his phase-determinations of the total solar eclipse of 3 May 1715. On 14 July 1715 Pound observed an occultation of a star by Jupiter, on 30 October an eclipse of the moon, and made, in 1716 and 1717, various planetary observations all with a fifteen-foot telescope.

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