Early Life
Jameson was born in Leith on 11 July 1774, the son of Thomas Jameson (c.1750-1802), a soap manufacturer, and Catherine Paton (1750–94). His early education was spent at Leith Grammar School, after which he became the apprentice of the Leith surgeon John Cheyne (father of John Cheyne), with the aim of going to sea. He also attended classes at the Edinburgh University (1792-3), studying medicine, botany, chemistry, and natural history.
By 1793, influenced by the Regius Professor of Natural History, John Walker (1731–1803), Jameson abandoned medicine and the idea of being a ship's surgeon, and focused instead on science, particularly geology and mineralogy. It is worth noting that Walker was a presbyterian Minister who had actually combined the Regius Professorship with a period of service as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1790.
In 1793, Jameson was given the responsibility of looking after the University's Natural History Collection. During this time his geological field-work frequently took him to the Isle of Arran, the Hebrides, Orkney, the Shetland Islands and the Irish mainland. In 1800, he spent a year at the mining academy in Freiberg, Saxony, where he studied under the noted geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749 or 1750–1817).
As an undergraduate, Jameson had several noteworthy classmates at the University of Edinburgh including Robert Brown, Joseph Black, and Thomas Dick.
Read more about this topic: Robert Jameson
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