388 Biographical Notice of Professor Jameson. 
+ ing birds, and in collecting animals and plants on the beach of 
eith and its vicinity. A strong desire to travel was the result 
of his favorite pursuits, and his father ultimately yielded to his 
often-repeated wish to enter on the profession of a mariner; but 
his friends interposed, and suggested that by adopting the study 
of medicine, he might equally be enabled to study the works of 
nature. He yielded in his turn, and was appointed assistant to . 
the late John Cheque, Esq., surgeon in Leith. He commenced 
his study of natural history in 1792, under Dr. Walker, then Pro- 
from his intercourse with Sir Joseph Banks, Mr. Dryander, Dr. 
Shaw, and other leading members of the Linnzean Society. With 
the exception of comparative anatomy, he now abandoned all 
idea of pursuing his medical studies. His attention was directed 
to the sciences of ornithology and entomology, then of chemistry, 
and subsequently of mineralogy and geology, including a thorough 
knowledge of analytical chemistry. In 1797 Prof. Jameson paid 
his first visit to the island of Arran, and in the following year he 
blished his work on the ‘ Mineralogy of the Island of Arran and 
the Shetland Islands, with Dissertations on Peat and Kelp,’ It 
was the first good geological account of these places and forma- 
tions, and soon acquired a well-merited celebrity. He subse- 
quently visited other portions of Scotland, and in 1800 published 
his ‘Mineralogy of the Scottish Isles,’ in two vols. Ato, illustra- 
ted with maps and plates. This work contained the first sketch 
of the geology of the Hebrides and Orkneys. 
But the real period of Jameson’s celebrity as a mineralogist and 
a geologist dates from the year 1800, when he left his native 
country for Freiberg, where he remained nearly two years study- 
chiefly indebted to the reports of Werner’s pupils, especially to 
those of Jameson, for our knowledge of Werner’s general views, 
so fully developed in his lectures, and there only.” Jameson also 
observed, in a passage which is too important not to be quoted on 
this occasion, pointing as it does to the very fundamental princi- 
ple of all our modern geological investigations, that ‘ Werner 
taught that mineralogical and geological characters, and charac- 
ters derived from organic remains, were to be employed in deter- 
mining formations, and that probably the same general geological 
arrangements would be found to prevail throughout the earth. 
But,” he added, “the truth or falsity of this view in regard to the 
