ABSTRACT
Although the time that Walker spent as Edinburgh’s professor of natural history has been addressed by several studies, the previous thirty years that he spent ‘mineralising’ have been virtually ignored.2 The situation is similar for many of the well-known mineralogists of the eighteenth century and there is generally a lack of studies that address how a mineralogist actually became a mineralogist.3 Alfred Whittaker’s work on Karl Ludwig Giesecke has shown that the reasons for this are many, but the most common problem is the lack of accessible primary
1 4 August 1764, John Walker to Baron Mure, NLS Mure of Caldwell Correspondence 1770-72 MS 4943 f. 98-99.
