Wernerian Natural History Society
Learned society for natural history, 1808 - 1858
The Wernerian Natural History Society (12 January 1808 – 16 April 1858), commonly abbreviated as the Wernerian Society, was a learned society interested in the broad field of natural history, and saw papers presented on various topics such as mineralogy, plants, insects, and scholarly expeditions. The Society was an offshoot of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and from its beginnings it was a rather elite organization.
The Society was named after Abraham Gottlob Werner, a German geologist who was a creator of Neptunism, a theory of superposition based on a receding primordial ocean that had deposited all the rocks in the crust. At this time all rocks, including basalt, and crystalline substances were thought by some to be precipitated from solution.
History
Robert Jameson, Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, was the founder and life president of the Society. In 1800, he spent a year at the mining academy in Freiberg, Saxony, where he studied under Werner. The Society was founded on 12 January 1808, and the first meeting of the Society occurred on 2 March 1808. Between 1811 and 1839 eight volumes of Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society appeared. More than twelve of Jameson's papers on geology and mineralogy were published in these volumes, and he also contributed some on zoology and botany. Proceedings after 1839 were published in Jameson's Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal.
The public source identifies “Wernerian Natural History Society” as learned society for natural history, 1808 - 1858. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wernerian, Natural and History.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wernerian Natural History Society” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.