Discussion on ‘Robert Jameson's transition from Neptunism to Plutonism as reflected in his lectures at Edinburgh University, 1820–33’: Scottish Journal of Geology, 56, 85–99, https://doi.org/10.1144/sjg2019-031

Abstract

In his illuminating review of the progress of Robert Jameson’s conversion from Neptunism (promoted by Abraham Werner) to Plutonism (developed from the ideas of James Hutton), Stone (2020) drew extensively on the extant lecture notes taken by some of Jameson’s students between about 1820 and 1833. Mention was made in passing of Jameson’s role as an early proponent of Scottish glaciation, but the secondary literature sources cited have their primary origin in the notes of another of Jameson’s students, James David Forbes (1809–68), which are now held in the Special Collections of the University of St Andrews Library but were not utilized by Stone. James Forbes – not to be confused with the eminent marine biologist, Edward Forbes (1815–54), who succeeded Jameson to the chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh in 1854 – was, in the words of his biographer, Frank Cunningham (1990), a ‘pioneer Scottish glaciologist’. Forbes attended Jameson’s lecture course in Natural History at the University of Edinburgh in session 1827–28 and repeated the class in 1828–29. Forbes’ notes provide a valuable complement to those cited by Stone. Cunningham (1990, p. 14) records that, on the basis of Forbes’ notes, Jameson ‘treated his students to a thoroughly Wernerian version of geology’. Forbes’ notes also provide additional constraint to the timing deduced by Stone for Jameson’s conversion; he was a thoroughly Wernerian Neptunist in 1828 but a convert to Plutonism by 1830. With regard to glaciation, Forbes records in his notes from Jameson’s lecture 12 on 27 November 1827: