SOWERBY, James (1757-1822), was at first a painter, but soon applied his art to the illustration of botanical and conchological works, which are still highly valued, especially his English Botany (12 vols. 8vo, 1846). His son George (1788-1854) followed in his father’s steps, and produced a monumental work on conchology.

SOWERBY BRIDGE, a manufacturing town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, is situated on both sides of the river Calder, at the termination of the Rochdale Canal, and on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, 2 miles south-west of Halifax, and 8 north-west of Huddersfield. Christ church, dating from 1526, was rebuilt in 1819. The other public buildings include the town-hall (1857) and the local board offices, opened in 1878, attached to which are the public baths and the slaughter-houses. The town is almost entirely the growth of the last fifty years. It possesses worsted and cotton mills, iron-works, dyeworks, and chemical works. The population of the urban sanitary district (area 536 acres) in 1871 was 7041, and in 1881 it was 8724.

Our Lord, in his parable of the sower, says, “Some seeds fell by the wayside, and the fowls came and devoured them.” Buckingham, in his Travels in Palestine, remarks, “We ascended to an elevated plain where husbandmen were sowing, and some thousands of starlings covered the ground, as the wild pigeons do in Egypt, laying a heavy contribution on the grain thrown into the furrows, which are not covered by harrowing, as in Europe.” The sowing “beside all waters,” mentioned by Isaiah, seems to refer to the sowing of rice, which is done on low grounds flooded, and prepared for sowing by being trodden by oxen and asses, mid-leg deep; thus, they send “forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass.”