#naturalist.

[scotianostra]

On June 3rd 1726 James Hutton, the chemist and geologist, was born.

I was busy yesterday getting drunk so playing catch up a wee bit.

James Hutton transformed our concepts of the earth and the universe by deciphering the message carried by common rocks.

He discovered that our planet is enormously older than people believed. He gathered evidence with his own eyes rather than relying on what ‘everyone knows’ or the written word. Prior to his work it was generally accepted in the West that the earth was about 6,000 years old, based on a literal interpretation of the Bible’s timescale.

Hutton devised one of geology’s fundamental principles – uniformitarianism – which says that the same natural processes we see operating today are the ones that have always operated, and that these everyday natural processes have shaped our world.

Other theories that require an immense amount of time – such as evolution by natural selection and continental drift – would not have been credible without Hutton’s work.

You can find out more on James Hutton at the link below. https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/earth-inside-and-out/james-hutton

[scotianostra]

On April 21st 1838, the naturalist John Muir was born.

Born in Dunbar, East Lothian, his parents were Daniel Muir and Ann Gilrye. He was the third of eight children: Margaret, Sarah, David, Daniel, Ann and Mary (twins), and the American-born Joanna. His earliest recollections were of taking short walks with his grandfather when he was three. In his autobiography, he described his boyhood pursuits, which included fighting, either by re-enacting romantic battles from the Wars of Scottish Independence or just scrapping on the playground, and hunting for birds' nests  As a child, he was raised  under a strictly religious upbringing.

John Muir was a naturalist, conservationist, explorer, and writer. At age 11, his family immigrated to the United States from Scotland and settled in Wisconsin. Muir learned to love the wilderness at an early age and even carved working locks out of wood. At age 21, he entered the University of Wisconsin, but left after three years. After suffering an eye injury while working in Indiana, Muir resolved to work in the wilderness.

In 1868, after roaming the North American continent, he landed in San Francisco. Muir explored California and was awestruck by its natural beauty. He soon became a successful writer, describing the landscapes and detailing the devastation of alpine meadows and forests by grazing sheep and cattle.

As a result of his efforts, Congress established Yosemite National Park in 1890. Muir was also involved in the creations of Sequoia, Mount Rainier and Petrified Forest National Parks. To protect the parks from poachers and land prospectors, Muir, and his supporters, formed the Sierra Club in 1892. He served as its president until his death in 1914.

Find out more about John Muir on The Sierra Club web page here http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir…/…/muir_biography.aspx

[scotianostra]

William MacGillivray, Scottish naturalist and ornithologist was born on January 25th 1796

Although a native of Aberdeen, MacGillivray spent his early childhood on Harris. He returned to the City to continue his education and graduated MA from King’s College in 1815. His early years were spent outdoors observing nature at first hand, a vital experience and one that confirmed in him his poor opinion of the ‘cabinet naturalist’ who never left his study. 

Aged 21, on the verge of his career as an outstanding naturalist and bird artist, when he left Aberdeen to spend a year at his childhood home at Northton in Harris. In that year he kept a detailed journal that provides a rare insight into the rural life of 19th century Scotland, especially of the Outer Isles. MacGillivray recorded details of everything that happened in his daily life, the weather, his feelings about the people that he met, the food that he ate, the clothes that he wore, even the games that his family played in the evening.

It was during his regular 360 mile commute on foot between Harris and Aberdeen that he developed a passion for natural history. In 1819 MacGillivray embarked on an even longer walk from Aberdeen to visit the museums in London. He covered 837 miles and chronicled his journey in a 60,000-word journal.

In 1821 MacGillivray moved to Edinburgh as assistant to Professor Robert Jameson, responsible for curating Jameson’s natural history collection. He was appointed conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1831. During this period he lived on meagre wages supplemented by copious writing. Ten years later, in 1841, he returned to Aberdeen as Professor of Civil and Natural History at Marischal College. He remained in post until his death in 1852.

MacGillivray was a much-loved lecturer within the college and to his extra-mural classes, impressing upon his students the importance of going out in the field and handling specimens. Over his career, MacGillivray produced books and articles at an astonishing rate, and covering a diverse range of natural history topics, but his most important works were his History of British Birds which appeared in five volumes between 1837-1852, and the posthumous Natural History of Dee Side and Braemar .

William MacGillivray was also a close friend and collaborator of the North American naturalist and painter John James Audubon. He worked with Audubon between 1826-1838, helping him write the massive text to accompany the latter's Birds of America. They remained life-long friends and MacGillivray brought with him to Aberdeen many specimens given to him by Audubon.

You can find a large collection of his drawings here at the National History Museum's website, a total of 213 watercolours of mammals, birds and fish.

A gallery showing the MacGillivray art collection

[scotianostra]

24th December 1914 saw the death of John Muir, noted naturalist, explorer, writer, and geologist.

John Muir was born in Dunbar, East Lothian on April 21, 1838. He was the third of Daniel and Anne Gilrye Muir’s eight children. Muir recalled in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) that his father was religious and extremely strict, keeping his children in line with frequent whippings. In 1849 the Muirs moved to the United States and bought farmland near Portage, Wisconsin. Muir’s father worked him hard on the farm and would not allow him to waste daylight hours on reading. Muir asked for and received permission to rise early in order to study. He invented an “early-rising machine” that dumped him out of bed at one o'clock each morning so that he could read. In 1860 he displayed this and other inventions at the Wisconsin State Fair.

In 1861 Muir entered the University of Wisconsin to study science. He also tried studying medicine but soon gave it up for various jobs that challenged his skill at inventing things. His interest in nature, particularly plants, was growing; he made frequent trips throughout Wisconsin and nearby states to observe plant life. In 1867 he gave up his own inventions “to study the inventions of God.” He set out on the walk described in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916). Actually, he went as far as Cuba. In 1868 he travelled to San Francisco, California, and worked on a sheep ranch. Exploring Yosemite Valley occupied much of his next six years. On all of his explorations he kept a journal of scientific and personal observations and also pencil drawings.

In 1880, after returning from exploring in Alaska, Muir married Louie Wanda Strentzel, the daughter of a Polish plant grower. They would have two children. In 1881, after another trip to Alaska, Muir settled on a fruit ranch near Martinez, California. He worked for ten years to make enough money to enable him to stop. Having provided permanently for his wife, two daughters, and himself, he turned his full attention to the study of nature. Glaciers and freezing particularly interested him, and his work contributed to an explanation of the process by which glaciers are formed. He also went on expeditions to Europe, Asia, and Australia.

In 1889 Muir argued in Century magazine that Yosemite Valley should become a national park. The passage of a law in 1890 making that happen owed much to Muir’s influence. The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, and his many articles in popular magazines greatly advanced the conservation movement, as did his creation in 1892 of the Sierra Club, an organization dedicated to preserving wild lands such as Yosemite. Muir served as the president of the club until his death.

Muir’s wife died in 1905. From then until his death Muir published four books, including Stickeen, which was a popular dog story, and My First Summer in the Sierra. 

He died in Los Angeles, California, on December 24th, 1914. 

John of the Mountain, drawn from Muir’s journal of his 1899 Alaskan expedition, was published in 1938.

[scotianostra]

On September 7th 1969 the Scottish naturalist and author Gavin Maxwell passed away.

Maxwell was educated at Stowe School and the University of Oxford, then became a freelance journalist, though ornithology remained his special interest. He served with the Scots Guard in World War II.

In 1945 he bought the island of Soay and described in Harpoon at a Venture he had an unsuccessful attempt to establish a shark fishery there.

Two of his most popular books were the best-selling Ring of Bright Water and the sequel The Rocks Remain about his life with two pet otters in his seaboard cottage in the west Highlands

Maxwell’s prolonged stay in Sicily resulted in two books, God Protect Me from My Friends , about the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, and The Pains of Death, on the poverty-stricken lives of the islanders. A Reed Shaken by the Wind is an account of his travels among the marsh dwellers of southern Iraq.

I return to Ring of Brightwater as this is no doubt the book, and film that you will most remember Gavin Maxwell  and a memorial to the otter Edal beside the river at Sandaig, Glenelg,  'Camusfearna' the setting of the book Ring of Bright Water. marks the grave of Edal, the otter who died in the fire that also destroyed Maxwell’s house. Cut into the stone is a plaque with one of his most-quoted edicts: “Whatever joy she gave to you, give back to Nature.”

Maxwell died from lung cancer in hospital in Inverness on this day in 1969.

Gavin Maxwell's memory is preserved in the books he wrote, which have an enduring appeal. He is also remembered by the The Eilean Bàn Trust & Bright Water Visitor Centre. This operates a visitor centre in Kyleakin and conducts groups of visitors around Eilean Bàn, visiting the lighthouse, wildlife hides and part of the lighthouse cottage in which Maxwell's "long room" has been recreated. It also rents out part of the lighthouse cottage on the island as a holiday let. 

The island of Eilean Bàn itself has changed significantly since Maxwell's time. In the early 1990s it was linked to both the mainland and the Isle of Skye by the construction of the two parts of the Skye Bridge, which opened in October 1995. Despite this, the island remains a haven for wildlife.

[scotianostra]

On November 3rd 1819 the  physician and naturalist Henry Duncan Spens Goodisr was born. 

Henry was born in Anstruther, Fife, the son of a surgeon, his elder brother was Prof. John Goodsir, who became Professor of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. Harry as he became known, was trained in Edinburgh, where his lecturers included the infamous anatomist Robert Knox and was licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1840. 

Harry served as Conservator to the Museum of the Royal College from 1843 until 1845, when he was appointed assistant surgeon and naturalist to the Franklin Expedition. This sailed to the Arctic aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, under the command of Captain Sir John Franklin, in search of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. 

Last seen in July 1845, the expedition was the focus of numerous searches and much speculation. His brother Robert Anstruther Goodsir, sailed twice to the Arctic in an attempt to determine the fate of Franklin's Expedition. Through talking to the Inuit, Orcadian John Rae was finally able to solve the mystery in 1854. The ships had become ice-bound and eventually the entire crew of 129 had starved to death.

Goodsir's name was inscribed on the Franklin Memorial at the entrance to the Chapel of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Over the succeeding years, the remains of several individuals were discovered in the vicinity of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. In 1869, the American explorer Charles Francis Hall was shown a grave by local Inuit on the island. Based largely on the clothing, the remains were identified as those of Lieutenant H. T. D. Le Vesconte and were returned to Britain to be interred beneath the Franklin Memorial at Greenwich. 

Further investigation in 2009, which involved facial reconstruction and isotopic analysis of the teeth, led to the conclusion these were not the remains of Le Vesconte rather they were most-likely those of Goodsir. 

The Goodsir Papers, held by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, comprise letters sent by Harry to his family before his disappearance. In 2018, a plaque was laid by family members near the spot where Goodsir died on King William Island.

The second memorial is to commemorate the Goodsir family in Largo and Newburn Parish Church 

[scotianostra]

The Scottish naturalist and mineralogist Robert Jameson was born on July 11th 1774 at Leith.

Jameson has always had a slightly sour reputation, primarily because of Charles Darwin’s reminiscences about his days at Edinburgh and Jameson’s’ “incredibly dull” lectures. Jameson was also one of the last of the geological Neptunists, who believed that all rocks, including granite and basalt, had been deposited from water, a view that Darwin also mocks in his Autobiography. But Jameson had a sizable up-side.  He was an avid collector of fossils, skins, and minerals, and his collection morphed into the Edinburgh College Natural History Museum (as seen in the second image),  which became the Royal Museum of Edinburgh in 1904 and is now part of the National Museum of Scotland.   By 1852 there were over 74,000 zoological and geological specimens at the museum, only second to the British museum in London.

It also  turns out that Jameson had a little secret that makes him much more interesting. In 1826, an anonymous article was published in the first volume of the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, titled “Observations on the Nature and Importance of Geology,” in which the author praised the idea of the transmutation of species, as advocated by the French zoologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Since there was a known Lamarckian at Edinburgh at this time, Robert Grant (whom Darwin praised in the same autobiography where he damned Jameson), it has always been assumed that Grant was the author of this proto-evolutionary piece. But this assumption was ill-founded, for it turns out that the most likely author is Jameson, he was proposing evolutionary ideas long before Darwin had any such notions!  If you like to divide historical figures into good guys and bad guys, and Jameson has usually been a bad guy, but it turns out there was more to him than people knew. Perhaps Darwin should have paid more attention in Jameson’s class.

Robert Jameson died at his home, 21 Royal Circus in Edinburgh, on 19th April 1854 after two years of illness, and was interred at Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh.