James Hector

James Hector

His position was one of the most extraordinary in relation to the Ministries of the sixties, seventies and eighties … no Ministry could afford to have him absent during the session, for he was scientific encyclopedia, oracle, and factotum to the Cabinet and the House.

Professor Macmillan Brown on Sir James Hector, from The Press, 7 December 1907

James Hector dominated institutional science in New Zealand in a way no one else ever has. Born into a middle-class Scottish family, Hector graduated in medicine from the University of Edinburgh in 1856. Science did not yet exist as an independent university subject, so medicine was a good route into a scientific career.

In the mid-19th century, Scotland overproduced medical graduates interested in the sciences. Hector, therefore, looked for employment overseas. In 1857, upon the recommendation of Sir Roderick Murchison, director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom, Hector was appointed geologist on the Palliser Expedition to British North America (now Canada).

Following this expedition, Hector again secured a position with Murchison’s help. In 1862, he arrived in Dunedin to conduct a three-year geological survey of Otago. Hector travelled throughout the south of the South Island to assess its potential for settlement and to record the location of useful minerals. He also assembled a staff of half a dozen men to assist with such tasks as fossil collecting, chemical analysis, and botanical and zoological taxonomy.

In 1865, Hector was appointed to found the Geological Survey of New Zealand, and he moved to Wellington to supervise the construction of the Colonial Museum, which was to be the survey’s headquarters. As the chief government-employed scientist, Hector gave politicians advice on questions as diverse as exporting wool to Japan and improving fibre production from New Zealand flax. His political influence was underlined by his marriage in 1868 to Maria Georgiana Monro, daughter of the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Hector managed the colony’s premier scientific society – the New Zealand Institute – for 35 years, and from 1885 was Chancellor of the University of New Zealand. He controlled virtually every aspect of state-funded science. He had close and, at times, tense relationships with other men of science, in particular Julius Haast. At the end of his career, he was criticised for failing to acquire Māori artefacts for the Colonial Museum and for not adequately defending his departments from the Liberal Government’s funding cuts. In 1902, for example, the ethnographer Elsdon Best wrote to Augustus Hamilton, the future director of the Colonial Museum, to state that Hector should be forced from office and that they should ‘put a live man in in his place’.

Hector retired in 1903, after four decades at the centre of organised science in New Zealand.  

By Francis Lucian Reid

Medals and awards

FRS 1866, CMG 1875, Lyell Medal of the Geological Society 1877, KCMG 1887, Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society 1891

Further reading

James Hector biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website

51 articles written by Hector, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are available online:

Articles by James Hector – Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand website

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of this image

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