John Turberville Needham

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John Turberville Needham. Portrait of Jean Baptiste Garand († 1780)

John Turberville Needham (born September 10, 1713 in London , † December 30, 1781 in Brussels ) was a Roman Catholic priest and English naturalist .

Live and act

He was the eldest son of lawyer John Needham and his wife Margaret Lucas Needham. He attended the Catholic college in Douai , Collège catholique anglais de Douai , since October 10, 1722 and then in 1738 the seminary in Cambrai . On March 8, 1731, he received his tonsure in Arras and was ordained a priest on May 31, 1738 in Cambrai.

Then, in 1740, he went back to England, where he worked in a leading position at a college in Twyford in Hampshire , school for catholic youth at Twyford . From 1744 on he lived in Lisbon for 15 months , where he taught philosophy at an English college. Needham had always been interested in the natural sciences and spent the following years partly in London, partly in Paris, and made important microscopic observations, which he described in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1749. In 1751, Needham went abroad and served as tutor to the Earl of Fingall and Mr. Howard of Corbie. He then accompanied Lord Gormanston and Mr. Towneley in the same capacity, and finally Charles Dillon, eldest son of Henry Dillon, 11th Viscount Dillon (1705–1787) with him he spent five years in France and Italy (1762–1767). At the end of this trip he returned to Paris and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences in London on March 26, 1768 .

John Needham founded the Académie impériale et royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles in Brussels in 1773, of which he was director until 1780. In 1768 he was appointed a member of the Royal Society in London and a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris. With Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon carried out microscopic examinations in 1748. The government appointed him a canon in the collegiate church of Dendermonde , collegiate church of Dendermonde , on November 29, 1773 he became a canon in the collegiate and royal church of Soignies in Hainaut , St. Vincent . In addition, he became a member of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País in Vitoria-Gasteiz Spain on September 19, 1771 , on October 10, 1779 in the Société Libre d'Émulation de Liège and on July 28, 1781 in the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland elected. The experiments and hypothesis of Needham about the spontaneous origin of life were included in his considerations for his work System der Natur by the French philosopher and enlightener Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach .

He died in Brussels on December 30th 1781 and was buried in the vaults of Coudenberg Abbey.

In his work Observations upon the Generation, Composition, and Decomposition of Animal and Vegetable Substances (1748), he attempted to present a theory of the spontaneous generation of life . With this vitalistic theory, he turned against views that wanted to describe life processes exclusively with the help of physical and chemical laws.

Fonts (selection)

  • Observations upon the Generation, Composition, and Decomposition of Animal and Vegetable Substances. 1748.
  • Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 1749.
  • New microscopical discoveries. 1745.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Needham. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved April 25, 2019 .
  2. ^ Cooper Thompson:  Needham, John Turberville . In: Sidney Lee (Ed.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 40:  Myllar - Nicholls. MacMillan & Co, Smith, Elder & Co., New York City / London 1894, pp 157 - 159 (English).
  3. ^ List of members since 1666: letter N. Académie des sciences, accessed on January 27, 2020 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Needham, John Turberville
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Roman Catholic priest and English naturalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1713
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1781
Place of death Brussels