Leonard Horner

Leonard Horner FRSE FRS FGS (17 January 1785 – 5 March 1864) was a Scottish merchant, geologist and educational reformer.

[3] Leonard, the third and youngest son, attended the High School and entered the University of Edinburgh in 1799.

There in the course of the next four years he studied chemistry and mineralogy, and gained a love of geology from Playfairs Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory.

[5] In 1833 he was appointed one of the commissioners to inquire into the employment of children in the factories of Great Britain, and he was subsequently selected as one of the inspectors.

He held this post for 26 years and during this time arguably did more to improve the working condition of women and children in the mills of north England than any other person in the 19th-century and for which he was praised by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.

In later years he devoted much attention to the geological history of the alluvial lands of Egypt; and in 1843 he published his Life of his brother Francis.

The eldest, Mary Elizabeth, married Sir Charles Lyell,[7] author of The Principles of Geology in 1832.

Two other daughters, Susan and Joanna, were known in their day as the authors of a book on walking tours of Florence, Italy.