England and France. The French part of his education was not altogether a success, for most of the boys at the school were English.
Passing through London on his return he had breakfast with Sir Roderick Murchison, who took him to the Geological Society. This was in March 1832, when he was little more than 15. Certainly his entrance into the scientific world was made easy for him. Would it be made equally easy now for a boy in a similar position? In the same year, 1832, Williamson was articled to Mr Thomas Weddell, a medical practitioner at Scarborough. While with him, he continued to pursue Natural History as a recreation—bird-collecting for example, and also botany. He writes, "I was then forming a collection of the plants of Eastern Yorkshire, as well as trying to master the natural classification, which was already beginning to supplant the Linnean method, so long the one universally adopted[1]."
A memoir on the rare birds of Yorkshire was communicated to the Zoological Society of London—an early work though not quite the earliest. While with Mr Weddell, Williamson contributed a number of descriptions and drawings of oolitic plants to Lindley and Hutton's Fossil Flora. He tells us how the drawings had to be made in the evenings on Mr Weddell's kitchen table. The plants he illustrated had for the most part been collected by his father and John Bean in a small estuarian deposit at Gristhorpe Bay. More than 30 species were thus recorded by him.
He also made diagrams to illustrate some lectures on Vegetable Physiology given by Mr Weddell at the Mechanics' Institution. It is rather surprising to find that such a course was given in a country town during the early 'thirties. Probably the learning displayed was not very deep, for Mrs Marcet's Conversations seem to have been the chief authority.
In 1834-36 Williamson published important papers, determining geological zones, from the Lias to the Cornbrash, by means of their fossils; subsequently he extended his zoning work up to the Oxford Clay.
The opening of the Gristhorpe tumulus in July 1834, when
- ↑ Reminiscences, p. 33.
