[T]he present most fashionable Study seems to be that of Natural History: there are few parts of the learned World, where of late years it has not been cultivated, with particular attention, & made greater progress than in any former Period. -- David Skene
David Skene was a physician and natural historian whose scientific correspondence and discourses presented to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society on "the extent and division of natural history" and on botanical taxonomy are significant not only for what they reveal about the state and role of natural history in the Scottish Enlightenment but also for their contribution to our understanding of the international community that fashioned early modern science and laid the foundation for later conceptions of difference and change in the biological world--including distinctions between human and non-human species and among human groups. This edition presents edited texts of Skene's letters and discourses along with textual notes, photographic facsimiles of copy texts, and explanatory notes.
David Skene was born 13 August 1731, the son of Dr. Andrew Skene, an Aberdeen physician. He attended the Aberdeen Grammar School, completed the arts course at Marischal College in 1748, studied medicine in Edinburgh, London, and Paris from 1751 to 1753, and botany in Edinburgh after his studies abroad. After receiving his medical degree from King's in 1753, he assisted in his father's practice, but his ties to the universities remained close--he was elected Dean of Faculty in Marischal College annually from 1767 until his death in 1770.
A founding member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Skene attended over half of the meetings held while he was a member, and he was elected president of the society in March 1766. His dozen discourses fall into four groups. The first and third focus on "the Philosophy of the Mind," while the second examines "the Nature of Happiness" (Skene also proposed a question on happiness, which the society discussed six months before he delivered his discourse). The fourth through ninth discourses constitute a six-part series on natural history, and the final three--all delivered on 14 November 1769--concern "methods of classing plants." Skene also proposed a dozen questions, and these show as much variety as those proposed by any other member, taking in economics, education, government, language, law, and moral philosophy. One area his questions do not cover is his own specialty, natural history. However, he did write an abstract of the conversation on a biological question proposed by Campbell, "Can the Generation of Worms in the Bodies of Animals be accounted for on the common Principles of Generation?" Though Skene never published any of his work in natural history, ample evidence suggests that he was a well-respected and assiduous field biologist. He was a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh from 1765 until his death, and he regularly corresponded with leading naturalists of the day, including John Ellis (1710?-1776), John Hope (1725-86), Linn¾us (1707-1778), Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and John Walker (1731-1803), at least three of whom acknowledged his contributions in their work. In a letter to SkeneÕs father written soon after leaving Aberdeen for Glasgow, Thomas Reid provides a personal view of David Skene's devotion to field biology:
Is Dr David littering up your house more and more with all the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and the clods of the valley? Or has Walker, the botanist, been carrying him about to visit vegetable patients, while you are left to drudge among the animal ones? (Works 1: 40). ReidÕs correspondence also shows that he regularly sent scientific instruments to the Skenes, including thermometers, a "perspective machine," and a "chymical furnace" (Works 1: 42-47, passim).
Indeed, Reid thought enough of Skene's potential to urge him to apply for a post at Edinburgh in order to advance his scientific work (Works 1: 45-46). In 1767, John Hope offered to resign his Chair of Materia Medica at Edinburgh in favor of Skene, but Skene declined the terms. Reid also encouraged Skene to publish his work, as shown in the following letter, written shortly before Skene's death:
I know you are gathering heaps of fossils, vegetables, and animals, and I hope among other fossils you are gathering gold and silver; this is all very right. I know likewise that you have been, ever since you was in petticoats, most avariciously amassing knowledge. But is it all to die with you, and to be buried in your grave? This, my dear sir, ought not to be. . . . Can you find no time, either when you are laid up in the gout, or when the rest of the world is in good health, to bequeath something to posterity? (Works 1: 49).
Though he did not live to publish his work, many of Skene's papers survive, collected and bound by his nephew, Alexander Thompson of Banchory. Skene's papers provide valuable documentation of eighteenth-century medical practice, of the natural history and geology of northeast Scotland (including descriptions of several plant species that no longer grow in the area), and of the deliberations of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. Indeed, Skene's papers provide more information about the society--in the form of successive drafts of discourses and abstracts of conversations on questions--than any collection of materials other than Thomas Gordon's papers and the society's minute book itself.
File last updated on March 1, 2001