Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 7.djvu/294

 officer, zeal for the advancement of science, and the untiring assiduity and exactness of his magnetic and other observations. The Transactions of the Royal Society, as well as the published results of the Antarctic Expedition, bear ample testimony to his diligence and ability.  Robert Jameson was born at Leith on the 11th of July 1774. Of his early years it is reported that he showed a decided bent towards the study of external nature, and although he went through the course of apprenticeship and college study then usual for young men entering the medical profession, he never engaged in practice, but devoted himself to the pursuit of natural history as the main occupation of his life.

The first fruits of his labours as an original inquirer were given to the world in his "Outlines of the Mineralogy of the Shetland Islands and of the Island of Arran," published while he was yet a very young man; and this was followed by a more important work entitled the "Mineralogy of the Scottish Isles," and containing the results of further local investigation. The success of these early essays served only as an inducement to extend and deepen the foundations of his knowledge, and with this view he spent nearly two years in the great school of mining and mineralogy at Freyburg, under the tuition of the celebrated Werner. Returning home from Germany, he was appointed in 1804 to the chair of Natural History in the University of Edinburgh, which had become vacant by the death of his early friend and preceptor, Dr. Walker. When thus established as a teacher in the chief seat of learning in his native country, he seems to have early entertained the project of a great work on the Geology of Scotland, in which the whole was to be described, county by county, and he made a commencement with "The Mineralogy of Dumfries." From this undertaking, however, he was soon called off to prepare various elementary and systematic works for the geological student ; and accordingly a treatise "On the external Characters of Minerals," and a "System of Mineralogy and Geognosy" soon appeared from his pen, and, after a longer interval, his "Manual of Mineralogy and of Mountain Rocks." He also contributed several articles on different branches of Natural History to the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia and 