Bøger af Thomas Thomson

Explorer and naturalist Thomas Thomson (1817-78) led an intrepid life. He started his career as an assistant surgeon with the East India Company and soon became a curator of the Asiatic Society's museum in Bengal. He was sent to Afghanistan in 1840 during the First Anglo-Afghan War, and was captured but managed to escape as he was about to be sold as a slave. Undaunted by this misfortune, he accepted a perilous mission to define the boundary between Kashmir and Chinese Tibet in 1847. During his eighteen-month journey, Thomson explored the Kashmir territories and went as far north as the barren Karakoram Pass. He collected valuable geographical and geological information as well as a wealth of botanical specimens. He describes his findings in minute detail in this account, first published in 1852. Thomson later became a Fellow of the Linnean Society, the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society.

The Royal Society has been dedicated to scientific inquiry since the seventeenth century. In 1811, Thomas Thomson (1773-1852), a pioneering chemistry teacher who was elected a fellow of the society in the same year, undertook the project of writing a history of the organisation's illustrious past. In this book, published in 1812, Thomson explains how the group began in 1645, initiated by men who met once a week to discuss natural philosophy and mathematics. They were eventually granted a royal charter by Charles II in 1662. The society grew in number and prestige, and began publishing research in its Philosophical Transactions in 1665. Thomson's work focuses particularly on the development of the group's many scientific areas of interest and summarises various papers it published. He also includes a full list of the fellowship, from the society's foundation to 1812, and a copy of the society's original charter.