Excerpt from Necrological Notice: Of the Richard Stockton of Princeton, New Jersey, Read Before the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, Regular Monthly Meeting, Thursday Evening, October 6, 1870

At the meeting next following the demise of our late Honorary Vice-President for the State of New Jersey, Richard Stockton Field, LL. D., I presented for your consideration some resolutions of respect to his memory, and I will now ask your attention while I sketch briefly his life.

Richard Stockton Field was born at Whitehill, in the county of Burlington, New Jersey, on the last day of December, 1803. The history of the family descent is somewhat obscure, but it is certain that he was descended from the same family as John Field, the distinguished English astronomer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who was the first to use the Copernican system as a basis for calculations for practical purposes, in his "Ephemeris anni 1557 currentis, juxta Copernici et Reinhaldi Canones fideliter per Joannem Field." This work, which was of considerable magnitude, was undertaken at the suggestion of the celebrated Dr. Dee, and was probably the very first publication in which any notice was taken of the discoveries of Copernicus. This John Field was born about the year 1520, and was a son of Richard Fielde of Ardsley, who was likely a grandson of William Fielde or Feld of Bradford, who died in 1480. In 1555, the year before he published his first Ephemeris, he was admitted fellow of Lincoln's College, Oxford. About 1560 he married Jane Amyas, a daughter of John Amyas, of Kent, and removed from London, where he had been living, to Ardsley, where he died in 1587.

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