John Hawkins (geologist)
| John Hawkins | |
|---|---|
| Born |
6 May 1761 Probus, Cornwall |
| Died | 4 July 1841 (aged 80) Probus, Cornwall |
| Residence | Cornwall & Sussex |
| Citizenship | British |
| Fields | Geology |
| Institutions | RGSC, Geological Society, Royal Society |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
John Hawkins (6 May 1761 – 4 July 1841) was an English geologist, traveller and writer.
He was the youngest son of Thomas Hawkins of Trewinnard, St Erth, Cornwall, M.P. for Grampound, by Anne, daughter of James Heywood of London. His older brother, Sir Christopher Hawkins, became an MP and mineowner.
He was educated at Helston school, Winchester College, and took his BA from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1782. He then entered Lincoln's Inn (the family tradition was the practice of law), but decided to travel instead, and in Germany he studied mining and mineralogy.
Hawkins was a man of considerable means, owning much Cornish mining property, and inherited the Trewithen Estate. He devoted his long life to the study of literature, science, and art. He travelled in Greece, where he purchased stele, and in the Levant, and wrote dissertations ‘On the Syrinx of Strabo and the Passage of the Euripus,’ ‘On the site of Dodona,’ and the like which are printed in Robert Walpole's Memoirs of European and Asiatic Turkey (1818), and Walpole's Travels in various Countries of the East.
In 1806 Hawkins purchased Bignor Park, Sussex, formerly the residence of the poet Charlotte Turner Smith. In 1826-32 he rebuilt the house as a secondary residence more convenient to Westminster than his Cornish estate, and collected a great number of valuable paintings and drawings to add to his antiquities.
Hawkins, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1791, wrote a number of papers on scientific subjects, most of them connected with the geology of Cornwall (a full list is given in Boase and Courtney's Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, i. 222, 223, iii. 1224).
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