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.

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