Background
John Fleming was born on January 10, 1785, on Kirkroads Farm near Bathgate in Scotland. He was the son of Alexander Fleming and his wife Catherine Nimmo.
University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, United Kingdom
John completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1805.
United Kingdom
John Fleming
United Kingdom
John Fleming
clergyman educator geologist naturalist writer
John Fleming was born on January 10, 1785, on Kirkroads Farm near Bathgate in Scotland. He was the son of Alexander Fleming and his wife Catherine Nimmo.
John completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1805.
John Fleming was licensed as a minister in the Church of Scotland in 1806. He served in the small parishes of Bressay, Shetland, and Flisk, Fifeshire, and in the larger parish of Clackmannan, near Edinburgh, before becoming professor of natural philosophy at King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1834. When the Free Church broke away in 1843, Fleming joined it; and in 1845 he became professor of natural science at New College, Edinburgh.
Fleming’s scientific career may be divided into four periods: a Wernerian period (1808-1820), when he was a disciple of Robert Jameson; a period of pro¬ductivity and controversy (1820-1832); a period of reduced productivity (1832-1845), due to the pressure of his duties at Clackmannan and Aberdeen; and a period of renewed activity at New College (1845-1857).
Regarded as Scotland’s foremost zoologist as early as 1815, Fleming was concerned largely with the description and classification of freshwater and marine invertebrates. In his Philosophy of Zoology, he advocated the binary or dichotomous system of classification, in which a twofold division is made at every level into those animals that possess a certain character and those that do not, a different character being used at each level. Despite his claim that this system was a practical approach to a true natural system, little notice was taken of it by other zoologists because of its artificiality. His History of British Animals was a detailed description and classification of the British fauna, although it omitted the insects, which were supposed to be covered in a succeeding volume that never appeared. The book was noteworthy for its inclusion of fossil species and for its application of the binary system throughout.
Although Fleming always had a low opinion of James Hutton’s theory of the earth because of its plutonism and because he considered Hutton an incompetent mineralogist, he did agree with the Huttonians that knowledge of the present was the key to the past. From 1824 to 1826, with Jameson’s secret encouragement, Fleming engaged in a controversy with William Buckland in which he showed that Buckland’s theory of a violent deluge contradicted both the Bible and the scientific evidence. Fleming argued that the Bible represented the deluge as nonviolent, and he attributed the so-called “diluvial” phenomena to local river floods, the bursting of lakes, and uprisings of the sea. In a controversy with William Conybeare in 1829, Fleming disputed the fossil evidence for a warmer climate in the past, insisting that our knowledge of the habits of an existing species can tell us nothing about the behavior of a similar, but not identical, fossil species, since every species is fixed and unique in its behavior.
Fleming had argued in his controversy with Buckland that there must be free inquiry in science without regard for the Bible, yet in his History of British Animals he adopted a scheme of reconciliation between geology and Genesis that was originally proposed by a friend, the Reverend Thomas Chalmers, on the basis of Cuvier’s idea of successive creations. This theory, which was elaborated by Fleming in his Lithology of Edinburgh, assumed that the “pre-Adamic” life had been totally destroyed by some extraordinary cause (probably the darkening of the sun) accompanied by debacles of water rushing over the earth. The species of animals and plants of the present epoch had then been created during the six days (or periods) described in Genesis. Similar revolutions, he believed, had initiated at least five previous epochs in earth history. Thus it can be seen that Fleming rejected Lyell’s uniformitarian views for earth history as a whole. The idea of evolution was, of course, anathema to him, and we find him in 1854 citing Scripture in opposition to it.
The discrediting of neptunism around 1820 only served to reinforce Fleming's already skeptical attitude toward geological theory. His contributions to geology were therefore essentially negative - the effective criticism of inadequate theories. His views, which were relatively enlightened in the 1820’s, when they were opposed to the catastrophist excesses of Cuvier and Buckland, were definitely outmoded by the 1850’s. Despite his extensive zoological and paleontological knowledge, Fleming had been trained in the old mineralogical school of geology and apparently never fully accepted the new geology, which relied boldly upon paleontological criteria in correlating strata.
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1821Fleming was a vitalist who was strongly opposed to materialism. He believed that a 'vital principle' was inherent in the embryo with the capacity of "developing in succession the destined plan of existence."
Fleming was a member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh and the Wernerian Natural History Society.
Fleming’s disposition tended to be grave and critical - what humor he had was often sarcastic - but his kindness and honesty were appreciated by those who knew him. Fleming was by nature conservative, reluctant to alter his views once they had been firmly established.
Physical Characteristics: After 1834 Fleming began to suffer spells of ill health, which became more frequent until his death.
John Fleming was married to Melville Christie. They had a son, Andrew Fleming.