Regency Personalities Series-Wernerian Natural History Society
Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.
Wernerian Natural History Society
January 12, 1808 – April 16, 1858
Wernerian Natural History Society was a learned society interested in the broad field of natural history, and saw papers presented on various topics such as mineralogy, plants, insects, and scholarly expeditions. The Society was an offshoot of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and from its beginnings it was a rather elite organization.
The Society was named after Abraham Gottlob Werner, a German geologist who was a creator of Neptunism, a theory of superposition based on a receding primordial ocean that had deposited all the rocks in the crust. At this time all rocks, including basalt, and crystalline substances were thought by some to be precipitated from solution.
Robert Jameson, Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, was the founder and life president of the Society. In 1800, he spent a year at the mining academy in Freiberg, Saxony, where he studied under Werner. The Society was founded on 12 January 1808, and the first meeting of the Society occurred on 2 March 1808. Between 1811 and 1839 eight volumes of Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society appeared. More than twelve of Jameson’s papers on geology and mineralogy were published in these volumes, and he also contributed some on zoology and botany. Proceedings after 1839 were published in Jameson’s Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal. The Society hosted many of the notable scientists of its day.
Members of the Wernerian Society were entitled to use the abbreviation M.W.S. after their name. “Corresponding members”, based outside Edinburgh, used the designation C.M.W.S.
Members
Abraham Gottlob Werner
Sir Joseph Banks, President, Royal Society
Richard Kirwan, President, Royal Irish Academy
Robert Jameson, F.R.S.Edin., Professor of Natural History, University of Edinburgh
William Wright, M.D., F.R.S.S. (London and Edinburgh), A.L.S.
Thomas Macknight, D.D., F.R.S.Edin.
John Barclay, M.D., F.R.S.Edin., Lecturer in Anatomy
Thomas Thomson, M.D., F.R.S.Edin.
Col. Stewart Murray Fullerton (a.k.a. Fullarton)
Charles Anderson, M.D., F.R.C.S.Edin., Surgeon, of Leith
Patrick Walker, Esq., F.L.S.
Patrick Neill, A.M., A.L.S. (Secretary 1808-1849)
John Hutton Balfour, Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Sir Charles Bell, surgeon, anatomist, neurologist and philosophical theologian; authority on the human nervous system
Robert Brown, botanist and palaeobotanist, the first observer of Brownian motion
William Bullock an English traveller, naturalist and antiquarian.
Edward Donovan Anglo Irish writer, natural history illustrator and zoologist.
John Goodsir, anatomist, pioneer of cell biology
Robert Graham, botanist
Robert Knox, surgeon, anatomist and zoologist, whose career was ruined by his involvement in the Burke and Hare case
King Leopold I of Belgium
William Lochead, surgeon and superintendent of the Saint Vincent Botanical Garden
William MacGillivray, naturalist and ornithologist who worked with Audubon
Sir James McGrigor, physician, military surgeon and botanist who founded the Royal Army Medical Corps
Joseph Mitchell, civil engineer
Samuel Mitchill, physician, naturalist and member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate
Friedrich Mohs, geologist and mineralogist who devised Mohs scale of physical hardness
Alexander Monro, tertius, surgeon and anatomist who taught Darwin
Sir William Parry, Arctic explorer
Marc-Auguste Pictet, physicist and meteorologist
Robert Stevenson, lighthouse engineer
Thomas Stewart Traill, physician, natural historian and scholar of medical jurisprudence
James Watt, pioneer of the industrial revolution
William Hyde Wollaston, physicist, chemist and physiologist who discovered Rhodium and Palladium
