Despite disliking the publishing trade, William Smellie became one of the premier printers in Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment. A promising student in medicine and natural history, Smellie was unable to take a degree at the university due to being unable to afford the costs of the lectures and used his career to push for the democratisation of learning. He edited the first edition of the Encylcopaedia Britannica (1768-71), published the first Edinburgh edition of Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1787) and printed William Buchan’s revolutionary Domestic Medicine (1769).
In 1765, Smellie won a gold medal for an essay contradicting Carl Linnaeus’s then accepted sexual theory of plants and soon developed a reputation for his expertise. He pushed for extended essays on both natural history and medicine in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and translated Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1780 & 1785). Smellie built upon his own ideas on the subject in The Philosophy of Natural History. The book came about through a suggestion of his patron, Lord Kames. The copyright for the first volume was purchased by Charles Elliot for £1000. However, due to the demands of his business, he was delayed in completing it until 1790, after Elliot’s death. A second volume was published posthumously in 1799. The avoidance of Latin and the easy-to-understand nature of the work, however, opened the subject to a wider audience, particularly women.
The Philosophy of Natural History was only moderately successful in Britain where works on the subject by clergymen such as William Paley (Natural Theology, 1802), due to their emphasis on the influence of God as Creator, dominated the market until the middle of the nineteenth century. It had more of an immediate success in the United States where an abridged edition by John Ware came to serve as the textbook for the curriculum at Harvard until the 1870s.
Nevertheless, the Midlands poet and philosopher Erasmus Darwin started to build upon Smellie’s theories on plants in his ode to the natural world Loves of Plants (1789) and his treatise Zoonomia (1794), which offered tantalising glimpses at ideas that were to be refined by his grandson, Charles, into the theory of natural selection.