John Mills, who had come to prominence …

Years: 1766 - 1766
John Mills, who had come to prominence in the 1740s, while working on the translation of Chambers's Cyclopaedia, is a person of considerable eminence in the eighteenth century, though little definite is known because no record exists of his life.

From his manner of expression, it is possible he may have lived his early life in foreign countries along time, possibly in France, but he was not born there.

In 1741 he was staying in London, where he had made preparations to go to Jamaica.

He had cancelled those plans because, as he wrote "having met with something more advantageous which engages me to stay in England", Mills married a French women, and they had two children; one baptized in Paris on April 27, 1742, and another born in May 1743.

In 1743 Mills was in Paris for the purpose of bringing out, in concert with Gottfried Sellius, a German historian, a French edition of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia; but Lebreton, the printer commissioned by him to manage the undertaking, had cheated him out of the subscription money, assaulted him, and ultimately obtained a license in his own name.

This was the origin of the famous Encyclopédie.

Mills, unable to obtain redress, had returned to England.

In 1755 Mills had started translation The History of the Roman Emperors, from Augustus to Constantine by Jean-Baptiste Louis Crévier from the French, and in 1763 Mills had continued and completed the Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, by Thomas Blackwell the younger.

In the 1760s he finds his true vocation as a writer on agriculture, which had started with his translation in 1762 of Duhamel du Monceau's Practical Treatise of Husbandry.

In 1766 he publishes an Essay on the Management of Bees.

The A New System of Practical Husbandry, (1767) treats all branches of agriculture, and contains the first mention of the potato as grown in fields.

On February 13, 1766, Mills had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society with Benjamin Franklin as one of his sponsors.

He is the first foreign associate of the French Agricultural Society, on whose list his name, with London as his residence, will appear from 1767 to 1784.

He is also member of the Royal Societies of Agriculture of Rouen, the Mannheim Academy of Sciences, and the Economical Society of Bern.

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