1890 - 1906

1890
Publication of immensely influential "The Golden Bough", by James Frazer, anthropologist, folklorist and classicist.

1891
An Comunn Gaidhealach is founded in an attempt to preserve Gaelic language, literature, art and music. Its activities will include an annual Mod.

Publication of geographer, meteorologist and oceanographer Hugh Robert Mill's "Realm of Nature", which is to change the teaching of geography in the schools of Britain.

1893
Andrew Fisher, later three-time Labour Prime Minister of Australia is first elected to the Queensland legislature. During his second term his land tax will help break up some of the country's over-large estates, the Navigation Action will protect the shipping industry and the Australian Navy will have its beginning.

Keir Hardie founds the Independent Labour Party to send working men to Parliament.

1894
Patrick Manson publishes his hypothesis that the mosquito can be host to a developing parasite of a human disease, an astonishing discovery that helps found the field of tropical medicine.

1896-1913
Scottish industry reaches its peak: one third of all British output comes from Scottish shipyards, matching those of Germany in the race to furnish merchant ships, ocean liners and the new battleships, the Dreadnoughts.

1898
Thomas Lipton founds Lipton, Ltd. in Glasgow that was to become a household name in the business of selling tea, coffee and other provisions in a vast empire of retail shops.

1899
James Douglas becomes president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. His ventures in the southwestern United States have done much to promote the economic growth of this region.

1900

Bonar Law (born in New Brunswick, Canada), enters the British Parliament violently opposed to Home Rule for Ireland. Just prior to World War I he will become the first Prime Minister to have come from an overseas possession of the Empire.

Mary Garden makes her debut at the Paris Opera, later being the model for Debussy's "Melisande". As Director of the Chicago Opera Association in 1921-2, she will played an important part in that city's revival of French Opera. Her most famous role will be one in which her erotic dances as Salome caused a wee sensation in staid Chicago circles.

Ramsey MacDonald becomes the secretary of the newly formed Labour Representative Committee, later to become the Labour Party, which he was to lead in 1911, succeeding fellow Scot Keir Hardie. In 1924, he will become Prime Minister of Great Britain.

1904
The Nobel Prize for Chemistry is awarded to William Ramsay, discoverer of argon and many other elements.

Scottish writer J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan debuts on the London stage.

1905
The world-class Glasgow Orpheus Choir is formed.

1906
Publication of "Collected Papers on Circulation and Respiration" by Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton shows that angina pectoris could be relieved by amyl nitrite.

The Cabinet of Henry Campbell-Bannerman passes the Trades Disputes Act, giving Labour union officials considerable freedom to call strikes.

Geologist Andrew Cowper Lawson publishes his commission's study of the California earthquake, the most complete ever made of a major quake. He has made his name for his revolutionary studies of Precambrian rock structures.