Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2012
Seldom, if ever, in the long histories of the Scottish Universities can there have chanced a centenary such as we now commemorate. In the same year, 1854, there died in Edinburgh two celebrated occupants of the Regius Chair of Natural History in the University, one full of years, with solid achievement and half a century of academic service behind him, the other in the first year of his Professorship, in the full tide of life, whose great accomplishment held promise of greater still; the one the master, the other his brilliant pupil and successor—Robert Jameson and Edward Forbes. Each of these men, in his own way, added enormously to the factual stock of knowledge, but the greater contribution was that each, by precept and example, helped to modify and mould the outlook of naturalists throughout the civilized world.
This paper was assisted in publication by a grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.