Robert Townson (natural historian)

Robert Townson (1762–1827) was an English natural historian and traveller, known also a mineralogist and medical man. In 1806 he emigrated to New South Wales.

He was born at Richmond, Surrey, the youngest illegitimate child of John Townson (1721–1773) and Sarah Aldcroft née Shewell (1731–1805). His father was a London merchant, his mother was from the Shewell business family, and she was married at the time of his birth to Charles Aldcroft, a haberdasher. His parents married in 1766, and John Townson died in 1774. From 1777 the Townson family were in Shropshire.

Townson, however, was an apprentice in Manchester from about the time the family moved. He didn't wish to enter commerce, and led a itinerant life that started around 1783.

In 1787 Townson was studying under the chemist Balthasar Georges Sage at the École des Mines; in 1788 he became a student at the University of Edinburgh. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1791, proposed by James Hutton.

In 1793 Townson made a journey through parts of the Kingdom of Hungary. That year he made the first recorded ascents of Kriváň, a peak in the High Tatras now in Slovakia, of Lomnický štít and of Jahňací štít. In 1795 he graduated M.D. at Göttingen University.

Townson was living in Shropshire, at Lydley Hayes near Cardington, when in 1800 Arthur Aikin was seeking him out for assistance on mineralogy. The General View of Agriculture survey for the county edited by Joseph Plymley (also Corbett, surname changed in 1804) in 1803 contained material published by Townson. His sister Ann had married John Witts (1750–1816), who became vicar of Cardington in 1774.

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