| Sir Richard Vyvyan | |
| Honorific-Suffix: | Bt |
| Parliament: | England |
| Birth Date: | 6 June 1800 |
| Birth Place: | Trelowarren, Cornwall |
| Death Place: | Trelowarren |
| Restingplace: | Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall[1] |
| Birthname: | Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan |
| Nationality: | British |
| Party: | Tory/Ultra-Tory |
| Spouse: | not married |
| Children: | no issue |
| Residence: | Trelowarren |
| Alma Mater: | Christ Church, Oxford |
| Occupation: | Landowner |
| Profession: | Scientist, politician |
Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan, 8th Baronet (6 June 1800 - 15 August 1879) was an English landowner and Tory politician who sat in the House of Commons variously between 1825 and 1857.
Vyvyan was born at Trelowarren, Cornwall, the son of Sir Vyell Vyvyan, 7th Baronet and his wife Mary Hutton Rawlinson, daughter of Thomas Hutton Rawlinson of Lancaster. He was educated at Harrow School and at Christ Church, Oxford but did not take a degree. In 1820, he succeeded to the baronetcy and Vyvyan family estates on the death of his father. He became a lieutenant-colonel commandant in the Cornwall yeomanry cavalry on 5 September 1820.
On his death his estate consisted of 9738acres in twenty-five Cornish parishes with a rent roll of £18,147.[1] He left no issue and his successor was Sir Vyell Donnithorne Vyvyan, 9th Baronet (1826–1917)
In 1825, Vyvyan was elected Member of Parliament for Cornwall. He held the seat until 1831. From 1831 he represented Okehampton, but upon the passage of the Reform Act 1832, he moved to Bristol, serving until 1837. He later served as Member for Helston from 1841 until 1857. Vyvyan was High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1840.
In 1826, Vyvyan was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for his "considerable literary and scientific acquirements especially in the Philosophy of Natural History",[2] previously having been a Fellow of theGeological Society.[2] He was also the patron of Charles Thomas Pearce, who he initially employed as his secretary in about 1843, and with whom he undertook "researches on light, heat, and magnetism of the Moon's rays" over a period of years. Between 1846 and 1848, they shared a house built by Decimus Burton in London's Regent's Park, called St. Dunstan's Villa.
Vyvyan was an advocate of Lamarckian evolution and transmutation of species. He was erroneously suspected of writing Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation until he denied authorship.[3] Historian of science Pietro Corsi has written that Vyvyan "endorsed a quasi-Lamarckian transformation of species, together with phrenology and a broadly evolutionary cosmology."[4]
He also published several letters and speeches. His letter to the magistrates of Berkshire on their practice of 'consigning prisoners to solitary confinement before trial, and ordering them to be disguised by masks,' passed into a second edition in 1845. His account of the fogou or cave at Halligey, Trelowarren, is in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall (1885, viii. 256–8).