JOHNSTON, JAMES FINLAY WEIR

(b. Paisley, Scotland, 13 September 1796; d. Durham, England, 18 September 1855),

chemistry, agriculture, teaching, and popularization.

Johnston was a founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, compiling a report on isomerism and isomorphism for its 1837 meeting. He lectured at the newly founded Durham University, became an authority on applied chemistry, agriculture, and geology, and wrote very successful, widely translated popular works.

Johnston was the eldest son of James Johnston, a merchant of Kilmarnock. At Glasgow University, paying his way by tutoring, he won prizes and medals in both science and humanities. Graduating with an MA in 1826, he opened a school in Durham; in 1829 he married a Northumberland heiress, Susan Ridley, nineteen years older than him. That year he visited the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius, and Johnston convinced him that the solid substance paracyanogen (which Johnston had analyzed) had the same components in the same proportions as cyanogen. He went on to attend that year’s annual meeting of German men of science. Much impressed by this open forum, he published an account of it; and with his friend and patron David Brewster he proclaimed the decline of science and the need to promote it, especially in the provinces. A founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which met first in York in 1831, he was never in its inner circle of “gentlemen of science.”

In 1832 another visit to Berzelius’s prestigious laboratory fueled his interest in the way atoms might be arranged in compounds. In 1837 he presented his commissioned report to the BAAS meeting at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on the puzzling relationships between chemical composition, chemical and physical properties, and crystalline form. Some different substances, such as paracyanogen and cyanogen, had the same composition: they were called isomers. Some elements (like carbon or sulfur) or compounds existed in two different physical forms: they were dimorphic. Some compounds, like those of ammonium and potassium, formed exactly similar crystals: they were isomorphic, and often isodimorphic, each existing in two different forms. And yet ammonium (NH₄) is composed of five atoms, while potassium has a single atom in its corresponding compounds: so crystalline form and atomic constitution could not be connected in any simple way. Johnston’s achievement was thus in clearly describing and classifying phenomena that still eluded satisfactory explanation.

In 1833 he was appointed reader in chemistry (at a salary of £50 a year, plus fees from students attending lectures; laboratory instruction was extra) at the newly founded and staunchly Anglican University of Durham, despite his belonging to the Church of Scotland. The little university, only the third to be chartered in England, was lucky to get a man with his reputation and connections. In the absence of a medical school in Durham, then the normal locus for chemistry, he strenuously promoted courses in engineering, involving practical work as well as advanced chemistry, geology, and mathematics. This pioneering venture, at first popular, did not ultimately succeed: engineering employers refused to recognize the new paper qualification as worth anything, making graduates begin on the shop floor and pay the full premium demanded of apprentices.

Holding forth at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle and at meetings of similar groups in the north of England, and in Mechanics’ Institutes (which he avidly promoted), Johnston became a very successful public lecturer. Such activity enhanced his professional reputation, and in 1837 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1841 the Chemical Society of London (in which expatriate Scots were prominent) was set up, and Johnston served on its council from 1842 to 1845. The 1840s were the “hungry forties,” and Johnston turned toward agricultural chemistry. He pressed in vain for agricultural teaching in the university, but established a course for trainee teachers at the diocesan institution in Durham. In 1842 he published Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (superseding Humphry Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, 1813); its nineteenth edition was published in 1895. Johnston’s brief Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology (1844) went through over thirty editions in his lifetime and was recommended by Leo Tolstoy, among others. Johnston’s English style was agreeable, and his books were also widely successful in translation; in Germany and Scandinavia he thus became known for his accessible writings, his fame being second only to that of Justus von Liebig. Believing that the Dutch chemist G. J. Mulder had been wronged in a dispute with Liebig, he provided an introduction and notes for the translation of Mulder’s Chemistry of Vegetable and Animal Physiology (1845). In 1849–1850 Johnston visited North America, where he had family, and in 1851 published Notes on North America, much concerned with agriculture (American wheat, after all, was a possible answer to European hunger). The book was noted for its lack of prejudice and exaggeration; visitors from Britain were customarily snobbish about democratic culture, but Johnston was not.

Johnston then settled down to write The Chemistry of Common Life, dedicated to Brewster and published in 1855, which became a classic of popular science writing. Beginning with food and drink, and going on to poisons and smells, it led the reader into thinking chemically, and it was up to date. It sold well, kept chemistry in the public eye, and can still be read with pleasure—evoking a time when chemistry was the fundamental, exciting, and popular science, and fertilizers and explosives were unquestionably benevolent. Johnston skillfully presented the science to anyone interested in how the world works; the book became in effect his memorial, because by the time it was published he had died from a lung infection caught abroad.

He had kept up Scottish connections, and had become professor to the Highland and Agricultural Society there. His volumes of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, duly marked “Professor Johnston” in a clerk’s hand, remained unopened and unbound; the run (now in Durham) was bequeathed to New College, Edinburgh, indicating that at the Disruption of 1843 his sympathies were with Thomas Chalmers, Hugh Miller, and the Free Church.

Johnston felt strongly about sanitary reform, Durham being a dirty little city in urgent need of cleaning up in cholera epidemics. He saw urban churchyards as a major source of infection; and was duly interred at Crox-dale, a village south of Durham. He bequeathed the residue of his estate for educational purposes; these included the Johnston Laboratory in Newcastle when in 1870 Durham University established a College of Science there, and in 1899 the coeducational Johnston School in Durham, now a comprehensive high school. Capable of research at the frontier of science, Johnston was most successful when communicating interest in and enthusiasm for useful knowledge.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Royal Society of London has articles and letters; the National Library of Scotland has correspondence with Blackwood, his publisher.

WORKS BY JOHNSTON

The Economy of a Coal-field: An Exposition of the Objects of the Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and of the Best Means of Attaining Them. Durham, U.K.: Andrews, 1838.

Elements of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1842.

Catechism of Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1844.

Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry and Geology. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1844.

With T. Watkin. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of Durham, Durham, U.K.: Durham City Sanitary Association, 1847.

Contributions to Scientific Agriculture. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1849.

Experimental Agriculture: Being the Results of Past, and Suggestions for Future Experiments in Scientific and Practical Agriculture. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1849.

Notes on North America, Agricultural, Economical and Social. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1851.

The Chemistry of Common Life. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1855.

OTHER SOURCES

Anonymous obituary in Quarterly Journal of the Chemical Society 9 (1856): 157–159.

Knight, David. The Transcendental Part of Chemistry. Folkestone, U.K.: Dawson, 1978.

Lundgren, Anders, and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, eds. Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and Their Audiences. Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2000. Standard work.

Morrell, Jack, and Arnold Thackray. Gentlemen of Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. The classic work on the early BAAS.

———, and Arnold Thackeray, eds. Gentlemen of Science: Early Correspondence of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Camden, 4th series London: Royal Historical Society, 1984. Includes letters.

Preece, Clive. “The Durham Engineer Students of 1838.” Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland, n.s. 6 (1982): 71–74.

David Knight