John Walker (1731–1803): The Minister Who Surveyed the Hebrides

established claims rest on university and church records, Walker's published works and modern scholarship, especially Charles Withers and Matthew Eddy on his science and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson on his role in Highland improvement. shared claims involve interpretation or sources that disagree. traditional claims are repeated but not documented.

The weak points are these. His large Hebrides report to the Annexed Estates, written under commissions of 1764 and 1771, was held by the Board for a time and then thought lost. A British Library manuscript (King's MS 105) is probably the missing volume, and Margaret McKay edited it in 1980 as The Rev. Dr. John Walker's Report on the Hebrides of 1764 and 1771. Until then its contents were known mainly through the rearranged version printed in 1808. Exactly when he handed it in is not clear. Accounts give different numbers for his students: Jonsson says about seven hundred, while class lists studied by Eddy suggest more than eight hundred. Some biographies date his professorship to 1762, apparently confusing it with his move to Moffat. The chair dates from 1779.

A minister who would rather be in the field

established Walker was trained for the ministry and served Glencorse, Moffat and Colinton, but his passion was natural history. At Moffat he collected fossils and minerals and studied the spa waters. In 1762 he wrote to Carl Linnaeus in Uppsala, declaring his allegiance to the "sex system" of plant classification. Linnaeus urged him to compile a Scottish flora and to record the altitude and soil of every plant. Walker never produced the flora, but he did take barometers and thermometers up the hills. He devised a way of estimating height from the temperature at which water boiled.

The Hebrides, 1764 and 1771

established Lord Kames, Walker's patron, secured him a joint commission from the General Assembly and the Board for the Annexed Estates to tour the Western Isles. He was to report on religion and education, but also on soils, plants, fisheries, minerals and the prospects for linen manufacture. From Stornoway he wrote to Kames that he had found a "New world", with fertile land left uncultivated, rich fisheries without nets, and fine harbours "as inanimate and unfrequented as those of the Terra Australis".

established His report described each island's climate and soil, and proposed crops and industries to suit. It recommended flax and hemp, kelp for glass-making, talc from Skye for porcelain and better forage for cattle, among much else. On Rum he identified purple moor grass as the basis for a new pastoral economy. On Tiree he recorded two crops of bere taken off the same ground in one season.

shared In 1995 a short article in the British Medical Journal suggested that Walker's description of an insect bite on Jura in 1764, and its after-effects, may be the earliest recorded account of Lyme disease and its tick vector. This is a retrospective diagnosis and should be presented as such.

Professor and teacher

established Walker was appointed to the Edinburgh chair of natural history in 1779 and began regular lectures in 1782. He taught meteorology, hydrology and geology in the first half of the session, and minerals, plants and animals in the second. He also lectured separately on agriculture. His students included the geologists John Playfair and Sir James Hall, the explorer Mungo Park, the chemist Thomas Charles Hope, the botanist Robert Brown, the physician Thomas Beddoes, Robert Waring Darwin, and Sir James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society of London. As his sight failed in the late 1790s, his assistant Robert Jameson took over some of the teaching.

established He was a founding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783 and secretary of its physical section from 1789. He collected samples of the mineral later named strontianite, from Strontian in Argyll, which contributed to the identification of strontium.

shared Walker's science was deeply religious. He held that every species had been fixed at the Creation and that none could become extinct, only "extinguished in a particular Tract of Country". He also rejected the idea that crossing two species could produce a new one. His classification of minerals was nonetheless widely used, and historians such as Matthew Eddy have shown how closely it was tied to the chemistry taught at the Edinburgh medical school.

The landlords' naturalist

shared Walker's greatest influence was on Highland policy. The historian Fredrik Albritton Jonsson argues that he was the chief intellectual sponsor of a "conservative" model of improvement. In that model, Gaelic tenants were kept on small plots worked with the crooked spade, the cas-chrom, and fed on potatoes, while landlords drew profit from kelp, cattle and military recruitment. Walker recommended the spade even where a plough would work, because of its "Influence on Population". He reckoned it raised "better than thirteen" bolls of bere where the plough raised ten. He also noted that "as the Potatoes have spread, all the Highlands, have from this Cause, become sensibly more populous."

shared He dressed this in the language of climate and character. A northern climate, he told Kames, made the nerves firmer and less sensitive to pain, "greater in the sedentary student than in the active plowman". Jonsson reads this as a medical justification for hard labour and for recruiting Highland soldiers.

established In later life Walker served the Highland Society of Scotland as its expert on kelp, peat and grazing. His kelp essay won the society's gold medal in 1788. In 1792 he persuaded the society to award a gold medal to Lord Kames's son for reclaiming Blair Drummond moss, which had resettled nearly six hundred Gaels "forced to abandon the high parts of Perthshire . . . on account of sheep farming". His "Essay on Peat" (1803) proposed rules for cutting and regenerating peat mosses so that they would not be exhausted.

Rival to Adam Smith

shared Walker had little time for abstract political economy. In a private notebook he dismissed Adam Smith's style as refining "plain thoughts" into "abstract terms" and called it "pedantry". For Walker, trade was simple and nature was complex. Economic advice had to start from local soils, climate and plants. Jonsson treats this as an early form of expert resource management, in contrast to Smith's trust in markets.

Mapping the Gaelic parishes

established Walker's reports are also a key source for the history of Gaelic. For him the Highlands were "best defined by the boundary of the Gaelic language", and he listed 162 parishes in which Gaelic was "either preached or spoken by the natives". Charles Withers, in Gaelic in Scotland 1698–1981 (1984), dates the list to between 1765 and 1769 and, combining it with Alexander Webster's population count of 1755, estimates that the Gaelic parishes then held about 290,000 people, nearly 23 per cent of Scotland's population. Walker recorded that on Lewis in 1764 scarcely anyone outside Stornoway understood English, and on Mull only about 335 people, some 6 per cent, could follow a sermon in it.

shared Walker could not speak Gaelic and wanted English to spread. But he argued that requiring ministers to preach in English every Sunday was counter-productive, because it shut most of the congregation out of the service and left them "rather prejudiced against the English Language". Schools, he thought, were far more effective: "Where-ever there are schools planted, there the English language makes a visible and considerable progress."

• One of Walker's parishioners complained that he "spent the week hunting butterflies and made the cure of the souls of his parishioners a bye-job on Sunday".
• Walker predicted that rice, already grown on the Weser in northern Germany, might one day be grown in Britain as plants slowly adapted to colder climates.
• He was among the first to defend the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian by collecting information in the Highlands, and he reported that Hebrideans lived "in almost the same Situation as in the Days of Oscian".
• He proposed planting seaweed on rocks placed along shallow beaches to increase the kelp crop.
• He believed peat moss could regrow in thirty or forty years if cut properly. That was far too optimistic.

• Myth: Walker became professor of natural history in 1762. Some biographies give that date, apparently confusing it with his move to Moffat in 1762. He was appointed to the chair in 1779.
• Myth: Walker discovered Lyme disease. A 1995 BMJ article suggested his 1764 notes from Jura may describe its symptoms and its tick. That is a modern retrospective reading of an old description, not a discovery.
• Disputed: Walker's support for spade husbandry was concern for Highland tenants. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson reads his defence of the crooked spade and the potato as a defence of keeping a large, poor population on the land, to serve landlords' profit from kelp and cattle and their recruitment of soldiers.
• Disputed: how many students Walker taught. Jonsson says about seven hundred, while class lists studied by Matthew Eddy suggest more than eight hundred.