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William MacGillivray
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PLAQUE022

William MacGillivray

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Dedicatee (Aberdeen, Scotland, 1796 - 1852)
DescriptionWILLIAM MACGILLIVRAY 1796 - 1852 ORNITHOLOGIST LIVED HERE

HistoryWilliam MacGillivray was born in Old Aberdeen on 25 January 1796 but brought up on Harris in the Western Isles. He returned to Aberdeen to read for a degree in medicine at King’s College. He did not complete the degree but it was there that he developed his life-time passion for natural history as studied through direct observation.

In 1819 he walked to London to see the collections of the British Museum. His route covered 500 miles before he even crossed the border as he took in the tops of the highest hills in Scotland down to Galloway and back to Carlisle. The journey south was 800 miles in all, though he perhaps wisely returned north by sea. He worked as assistant to Professor Robert Jameson in Jameson’s museum in Edinburgh through the 1820s and for ten years from 1831 as conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

While in Edinburgh he met and collaborated with the pioneering American naturalist and bird-painter John James Audubon. In 1841 he returned to Aberdeen where he was appointed as Professor of Civil and Natural History at Marischal College. His tireless efforts in this role consolidated his scientific reputation and popularised natural history in an unprecedented way in both the University and widely throughout region. He published the first work on zoology to come from the University (on local molluscs), delivered the first truly scientific lectures on geology at the University and published what has been regarded as the first ecological paper in the country. His five-volume History of British Birds was his scientific masterpiece.

Although not fully appreciated in his own lifetime, within a few decades of his death MacGillivray’s name was, and still is, held in the highest regard both in Britain and in North America as the first truly great professional ornithologist.

This plaque marks one of the houses lived in by MacGillivray in Aberdeen. It was originally 110 High Street but several properties were renumbered in 1907, this one becoming number 107.

Location Info107, High Street, Old Aberdeen
NotesImage Attribution: watty62, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons