He was the youngest son of John Wilson (died 1796), a gauze manufacturer, and his wife Margaret (born Sym), and was born at Paisley in November 1795. John Wilson who wrote as "Christopher North" was his eldest brother. Henrietta Wilson the writer was his niece, daughter of his brother Andrew.
His father having died during James"s first year, the family moved to Edinburgh, where he was educated.
In 1811 he began to study for the law, but his health was poor. In 1816 Wilson visited the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Paris. He later returned to Paris to purchase Louis Dufresne"s collection of birds for the museum of Edinburgh University.
And helped to arrange them.
In 1819 he visited Sweden, soon after which symptoms of lung disease appeared, and he resided in Italy during 1820-1821. In 1841, with Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, he made a series of excursions round the coasts of Scotland, at the request of the Fisheries Board, to study the natural history of the herring.
Other trips followed at intervals between 1843 and 1850, and fishing excursions inland. In 1854 he was offered but declined the chair of natural history in the Edinburgh University, then vacant by the death of Edward Forbes.
He died at Woodburn on 18 May 1856.
Wilson had joined the Wernerian Society when just 17, and was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Wilson was one of the first to have used the term "evolution" in the context of biological speciation. In 1830, he used this term in a paper on the history of goat and sheep, he wrote:
Whatever dreams the mystical imaginings of some modern philosophers may have given rise to regarding the origin of species, and the gradual evolution of one form of animal life as connected with or consequent upon another, it is not a bad rule, though a tolerably old fashioned one, to believe that in the origin of species nothing was left entirely to such casual intercourses, but rather that every thing was not only divinely planned, but directly performed, by the same simple though Omnipotent fiat which gathered together the waters under the heaven, and made the dry land appear, with all the beautiful, infinitely varied, and most harmoniously adapted inhabitants of either element.
Wilson"s use of the term predated Charles Lyell in 1832.
