Robert Jameson

Professor Robert Jameson FRS FRSE (11 July 1774 – 19 April 1854) was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist.

As Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship, his superb museum collection and for his tuition of Charles Darwin. Jameson was not at his best in the lecture theatre however, and, for the first half of his career, he grappled with his predecessor John Walker's perverse "Neptunian" geological theories. Darwin attended Robert Jameson's natural history course at the University of Edinburgh in his teenage years, learning about stratigraphic geology and assisting with the collections of the Museum of Edinburgh University, then one of the largest in Europe. At Jameson's Wernerian Natural History Association, the young Charles Darwin saw John James Audubon give a demonstration of his method of using wires to prop up birds to draw or paint them in natural positions. Robert Jameson was the great-uncle of Sir Leander Starr Jameson, Bt, KCMG, CB, British colonial official and inspiration for the Jameson Raid.

Jameson was born in Leith on 11 July 1774, the son of Thomas Jameson (c.1750–1802), a soap manufacturer on Rotten Row (now Water Street), and Catherine Paton (1750–94). They lived on Sherrif Brae. His early education was spent at Leith Grammar School, after which he became the apprentice of the Leith surgeon John Cheyne (father of John Cheyne), with the aim of going to sea. He also attended classes at the Edinburgh University (1792–93), studying medicine, botany, chemistry, and natural history. His father's brother Robert Jameson, was also a physician and lived with them on Rotten Row.

By 1793, influenced by the Regius Professor of Natural History, John Walker (1731–1803), Jameson abandoned medicine and the idea of being a ship's surgeon, and focused instead on science, particularly geology and mineralogy. It is worth noting that Walker was a presbyterian Minister who had actually combined the Regius Professorship with a period of service as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1790.

In 1793, Jameson was given the responsibility of looking after the University's Natural History Collection. During this time his geological field-work frequently took him to the Isle of Arran, the Hebrides, Orkney, the Shetland Islands and the Irish mainland. In 1800, he spent a year at the mining academy in Freiberg, Saxony, where he studied under the noted geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749 or 1750–1817).

As an undergraduate, Jameson had several noteworthy classmates at the University of Edinburgh including Robert Brown, Joseph Black, and Thomas Dick.

In 1799 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Andrew Coventry, Thomas Charles Hope and Andrew Duncan.

In 1804, Jameson succeeded Dr Walker as the third Regius Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, a post which he held for fifty years. During this period he became the first eminent exponent in Britain of the Wernerian geological system, or Neptunism, and the acknowledged leader of the Scottish Wernerians, founding and presiding over the Wernerian Natural History Society in 1808 until around 1850, when his health began to decline, together with the fortunes of the Society. Jameson's support for Neptunism, a theory that argued that all rocks had been deposited from a primaeval ocean, initially pitted him against James Hutton (1726–1797), a fellow Scot and eminent geologist also based in Edinburgh (but not in the university), who argued for uniformitarianism, a theory that saw the features of the Earth's crust being caused by natural processes over geologic time. Later in life, Jameson renounced Neptunism when he found it untenable and converted to the views of his opponent, Hutton.

As a teacher, Jameson had a mixed reputation for imparting enthusiasm to his students; Thomas Carlyle, who gave serious attention to Natural History, described Jameson's lecturing style as a "blizzard of facts" and Charles Darwin found the lectures boring, saying that they determined him "never to attend to the study of geology" . The detailed syllabus of Jameson's lectures, as drawn up by him in 1826, shows the range of his teaching. The course in zoology began with a consideration of the natural history of human beings, and concluded with lectures on the philosophy of zoology, in which the first subject was Origin of the Species of Animals. (The Scotsman, 29 October 1935: p. 8). Modern scholarship also suggests that, by 1826, Jameson was convinced of Lamarckian concepts of evolution, and that he could express this conviction only in anonymous terms.

Over Jameson's fifty-year tenure, he built up a huge collection of mineralogical and geological specimens for the Museum of Edinburgh University, including fossils, birds and insects. By 1852 there were over 74,000 zoological and geological specimens at the museum, and in Britain the natural history collection was second only to that of the British Museum. Shortly after his death, the University Museum was transferred to the British Crown and became part of the Royal Scottish Museum, now the Royal Museum, in Edinburgh's Chambers Street. He was also a prolific author of scientific papers and books, including the Mineralogy of the Scottish Isles (1800), his System of Mineralogy (1808), which ran to three editions, and Manual of Mineralogy (1821). In 1819, with Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), Jameson started the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal and became its sole editor in 1824.

He died at his home, 21 Royal Circus in Edinburgh on 19 April 1854, and was interred at Warriston Cemetery. He lies on the north side of the main east-west path near the old East Gate.

A portrait of Robert Jameson is housed by the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a bust of him is in the Old College of the University of Edinburgh.

Jameson never married and had no children.

He was the uncle of Robert William Jameson, Writer to the Signet and playwright of Edinburgh, and therefore also the great-uncle of Sir Leander Starr Jameson, Bt, KCMG, British colonial statesman.

His sister Janet Jameson (1776-1853) married Partick Torrie (1763-1810). They were parents to Thomas Jameson Torrie FRSE a geologist.

A further nephew was William Jameson FRSE who rose to fame in India.

A species of venomous snake, Dendroaspis jamesoni, is named in honor of Robert Jameson.

• (1798) The Mineralogy of the Shetland Islands and of Arran.
• (1800) Mineralogy of the Scottish Isles.
• (1804) System of Mineralogy.
• (1805) Mineralogical Description of Scotland, vol. i, part I.
• (1809) Elements of Geognosy.
• (1813) Mineralogical Travels through the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland Islands.
• (1821) Manual of Mineralogy.
• With James Wilson and Hugh Murray, (1830) Narrative of Discovery and Adventure in Africa, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time: with illustrations of the geology, mineralogy, and zoology. With a map; plans of the routes of Park, and of Denham and Clapperton; several engravings. First published in the Edinburgh Cabinet Library, 1830.