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.