Arthur Thomson (naturalist)

Sir John Arthur Thomson FRSE (8 July 1861 – 12 February 1933) was a Scottish naturalist[1][2] who authored several notable books and was an expert on soft corals.

He had already established a reputation as a worthy scientist within his first years and in 1887, aged 25, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

His proposers were Patrick Geddes, J. T. Cunningham, Sir John Murray and Robert McNair Ferguson.

[7] In his Gifford lectures and a number of books written with his friend Patrick Geddes he argued for a form of holistic biology in which the activity of the living organism could transcend the physical laws governing its component parts.

In 1889 he married Margaret Robertson Stewart and they were parents to the ornithologist Arthur Landsborough Thomson, who wrote a short biography about his father in School Nature Study, april 1944.