János Jacint Ronay, Leitzinger

* Székesfehérvár, May 13, 1814 – † Bratislava, April 17, 1889 / Benedictine teacher, writer, natural scientist, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1847) ; ; From 1840 he was a teacher in Győr. In 1841 he became a doctor of humanities at the University of Pest. Between 1843 and 1848 he was a teacher at the Győr Lyceum. When he held his academic chair inauguration on December 29, 1847, entitled On the Human Brain and Its Influence on the Spiritual Life, he already used the name Rónay instead of Leitzinger. In 1848 he was a national guard priest in Győr, in 1849 he was the government's priestly commissioner for Győr County, later a field chaplain in the Hungarian Army. After the defeat of the War of Independence he was forced to emigrate in 1850. He settled in London, and made a living from teaching and journalism. Among others, he taught Kossuth's children. As an emigrant, he contributed to the publication of István Széchenyi's work Blick. In England, he came into contact with geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), physician and biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and his theory of evolution. In 1861, he was elected as a member of the parliament of Székesfehérvár and a member of the Győr city committee, but he did not apply for clemency. From 1862, he introduced Darwinism in articles written for Hungarian newspapers and then in his book Fajkeletkezés. His work entitled Man's Place in Nature and Its Antiquity, following a genre popular in his time, is actually a transition between translation and free presentation. He was also among the first to interpret and disseminate the epoch-making new results of Darwinism in a European context. He recognized early on that comparative ethnographic research could provide answers to some questions of paleoanthropology. In 1867–1871, he edited the Bulletin of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and from 1867 he was elected as a member of parliament for the Pér district (Győr county). In 1871–1872, he taught the history of Hungary to the heir to the throne Rudolf, and in 1875–1883, he was a tutor to Archduchess Maria Valéria. In 1871, he left the Benedictine Order, in 1872 he became the Grand Provost of Bratislava, and then in 1873 he was elected bishop (of Shkodra). From 1883, he lived in Bratislava. He donated his rich library to the Toldy circle in Bratislava. He had previously been involved in fiction, and during his theological studies in Pannonhalma he wrote several plays in the style of Károly Kisfaludy. He also participated in the founding of the Hungarian Historical Society. He published his interesting memoirs in Bratislava under the title Napló töredék in 8 volumes, 10 copies (!) in 10 copies. In his last years, he was often ill, and his personal physician was Gábor Pávai Vajna, the chief physician of the Bratislava State Hospital, to whom he left his favorite pocket watch. ; ; His main works: ; A Spectacle from the Field of Experimental Psychology, 1846, ; Characterism, 1847, ; The Fire-Worshiping Sage on the Memories of the Ancient Worlds, 1860, ; Character Sketches from the English Color World, 1865, ; The Origin of Species. Man's Place in Nature and Antiquity, 1864, ; On the Progress of Primitive Man, 1868.