Dr. William Thomson, F.R.S., a Forgotten English Mineralogist, 1761 – c.1806

Abstract

WILLIAM THOMSON led two lives which seem never to have been correlated, certainly not in England. The first life culminated in his appointment as Dr. Lee's lecturer in anatomy at Oxford and his election into the Royal Society on March 16, 1786. The signatories to his certificate of candidature were the Hon. Charles Greville, Prof. R. Kirwan, John Hunter, S. F. Simmons, W. Pitcairn, Sir J. E. Smith, D. Pitcairn and Prof. T. Hornsby of Oxford. In 1790, he resigned all appointments, including the fellowship for which he had compounded on election. His second life was mostly spent in Naples during that pregnant period when Nelson and the British fleet featured so largely in all histories of Europe. There Thomson made a profounder study of volcanic phenomena than any Englishman, even counting Sir William Hamilton, had ever made before him.