As a young man in Leith, Robert Jameson looked out to the world and dreamed of a life at sea. Yet it was for work on the land around him that he became famous as a naturalist and mineralogist.

While a student at Edinburgh University, Jameson travelled across Scotland picking up pieces of rock and taking them home with him – perhaps if traffic cones had been around then, it would’ve been a different story. Jameson’s rock collecting did not stop when he graduated – and over 50 years he amassed 74,000 geological specimens. You just know that every time he brought a new sample home his wife must’ve tutted fondly and said, “what are you like with your stones. Be careful in the lounge, I’ve just had the sofa re-covered”.

Local author Daniel Gray salutes the forgotten heroes of Leith’s past: Robert Jameson 1774-1854...

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Jameson attended a mining academy in Freiberg, further enhancing his status as someone you really wouldn’t want to get stuck with at a party. Back in Edinburgh, he became a lecturer and then Regius Professor, a post he held for half a century. That’s a lot of leather elbow patches.

Early in his career, Jameson became Britain’s greatest advocate of Neptunism, the theory that all rocks come from a primeval ocean. Later, though, he renounced Neptunism entirely, a brave move in the world of academia; it’d be like Stephen Hawking going, “Er, actually there’s no such thing as outer space”.

Jameson published several pioneering works including the masterly Manual of Mineralogy. He inspired thousands of students, though his most famous, Charles Darwin, was less than impressed. Darwin later wrote, ‘during my second year at Edinburgh, I attended Jameson’s lectures on geology and zoology, but they were incredibly dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on geology”.

At the time, Darwin was just sixteen years old, and it’s entertaining to imagine him as a petulant student flicking ink at Jameson’s back as he drew igneous rocks on the blackboard.

By the time Jameson died in 1854, he had accomplished a breathtaking amount of work and enhanced humanity’s relationship with its land and origins. Seeing ships leaving The Shore, he dreamed of foreign climes and wondered how our planet had been formed. From Leith to the world, indeed.