Collins New Naturalist Library

Gerard Boate, a medical graduate of Leyden University, Holland, settled in London in 1630 where he was appointed Royal Physician to King Charles I. He subscribed to the fund established for the reduction of the Irish in Ireland, opened to the Dutch by a special Act of Parliament in 1642. He invested £180 in expectation of a reward of 847 acres in Co. Tipperary.27 That was about the time that Boate the physician became Boate the promoter of Ireland, working entirely from England: he ‘begun to write that work at the beginning of the year of our Lord 1645 and made an end of it long before the end of the same year: wheras he went not to Ireland untill the latter end of the year 1649’ as explained by his brother Arnold in the section in Irelands Naturall History entitled ‘To the Reader’. In 1647 Boate was appointed physician to the Army of Ireland but was unable for unknown reasons to take up his position until 1649.28 He died a few months after arriving in Dublin and his widow was left to claim the grant to the lands in Tipperary. Gerard’s manuscript was published by Samuel Hartlib in 1652.

Most of the knowledge in the book came from Arnold Boate, who had spent eight years in Ireland as Physician-General to the Army in Leinster, during which time he had gathered a large amount of information about the country. Much of it was probably obtained from surveyors, judging by the amount of topographic material in the book, especially concerning the coastline. Arnold ‘made very many journeys into the countrie and by meanes therof saw a great part of it, especially the provinces of Leinster and Ulster’. Before Gerard started writing the book Arnold went to London to spend six months with him ‘reasoning about Ireland … chiefly about the Natural History of the same’. Gerard set down what he heard and then conferred afterwards with various gentlemen including the Irish scientists William and Richard Parsons, who were exiles in London because of civil unrest in the colony. It is thought that the Parsons contributed a lot of the information, especially on geology and minerals.

The approach adopted by Boate in his book was one of scientific pragmatism, following the Baconian New Philosophy of utilitarianism which advocated taking advantage of the accumulated experience of artisans, gardeners, husbandmen, etc., to compile exhaustive ‘Histories of Trade and Nature’. Because of this new method, Irelands Naturall History was a major triumph over the antiquarian, anecdotal and chorographical tradition embodied in previous descriptive texts. The chorographical approach was not much more than a bare listing of natural history features whereas the artisans and others drew upon many years of practical management of the environment and were wont to make enlightening comments. Most of their statements were based on observation and in many cases verifiable facts – sometimes through scientific experimentation. The book went a long way to remedying many of the ‘chief defects for which the Truths of Naturall Philosophie and the products thereof….are so imperfectly known’.29 Regrettably, Gerald Boate’s plan to write a threefold sequel dealing with plants, other living creatures, and ‘old Fashions, Lawes and customs’ never came about because of his premature death.

Irelands Naturall History is divided into 25 chapters and written in a direct, unconvoluted style. After describing the situation and shape of Ireland, Boate turns to the provinces, the counties of the English Pale (an area around Dublin bounded by a palisade, to keep out the ‘barbarous’ Irish) and the principal cities and towns of Ireland. Almost one third of the book is devoted to a very detailed descriptive analysis of the coastline – its headlands, bays, sandbanks, harbours and anchorages. In this part Boate reveals himself as one of the earliest geomorphologists, with an interest in the coastal erosion produced by wave action. He was also clearly following Bacon’s advocacy that information should be gathered about the ebb and flow of the sea, currents, salinity, subterranean features, etc. Minerals and mining receive much attention, while the property of Lough Neagh’s waters to turn wood into stone was personally investigated by Arnold Boate (see here).

It was the bogs that fascinated Gerard, especially their potential for agricultural development. He thought they were of recent origin, only requiring drainage to make them available to agriculture – for pasture or good tillage land. He provided the first classification of bogs which were arranged as ‘grassy, watry, muddy and hassocky’. He thought that very few of the wet bogs were a ‘natural property or of a primitive constitution’ but arose through superfluous moisture gathering over time, arising from springs that had no easy run off for their water. The result was ‘rottenness and springiness, which nevertheless is not a little increased through the rain water coming to that of the Springs’.

The lack of woodland over the greater part of Ireland was noted by Boate who quotes that the area between Dublin, Drogheda, Dundalk, Newry, and as far as Dromore was bereft of woodlands ‘worth speaking of’ and without a single tree in most parts. Some great woods still persisted in Kerry and Tipperary, despite the depredations of the Earl of Cork, a well-known enemy of anything leafy and tall. The country had been well stocked with woods at the time of the Norman invasions:

‘In ancient times, and as long as the land was in the full possession of the Irish themselves, all Ireland was very full of woods on every side, as evidently appeareth by the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis…. But the English having settled themselves in the land, did by degrees greatly diminish the woods in all places where they were masters, partly to deprive the thieves and rogues, who used to lurk in the woods in great numbers, of their refuge and starting-holes, and partly to gain the greater scope of profitable lands. For the trees being cut down, the roots stubbed up, and the land used and tilled according to exigency, the woods in most places of Ireland may be reduced not only to very good pastures, but also to excellent arable and meadow.’

Boate went on to say that most of the woodland remaining after the initial English onslaught was destroyed for the manufacture of charcoal used in the smelting of iron, an industry started by the New English who had been in Ireland since the Elizabethan wars. Another aspect that Boate commented on was the nature of the soil in Ireland. He noticed that the surface deposits were varied – as the last Ice Age would have ordained them to be – but he did not speculate as to their origin: ‘The fertile soil is in some places a blackish earth, in others clay, and in many parts mixt of both together; as likewise there be sundry places, where the ground is mixt of earth and sand, sand and clay, gravel and clay, or earth; but the chalk ground and the red earth, which both are very plentiful and common in many parts of England, are no where to be found in Ireland.’

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Ireland for Boate was its suitability for agriculture. Emphasising the potential to make profits as a planter, he expounded various possibilities for the improvement of the land by drainage, the laying down of special manures, and the reclamation of bogs. He went to great technical length to make the prospect of tillage in Ireland an attractive one: ‘the best and richest soils, if but half a foot deep, and if lying upon a stiff clay or hard stone, is not so fertile, as a leaner soil of greater depth, and lying upon sand and gravel, through which the superfluous moisture may descend, and not standing still, as upon the clay and stone, make cold the roots of grass, or corn, and so hurt the whole.’

Other early endeavours

In 1633, 12 years before Boate was busy writing his book from his London quarters, a real field naturalist, Richard Heaton (c. 1604–c. 1666), born in England, first arrived in Dublin to become rector of Kilrush, Co. Clare, and later Birr, Co. Offaly, before returning to England after the outbreak of the Confederate War in 1641. He came back to Birr in 1660 and was appointed Dean of Clonfert later that year. It was only during his first sojourn that he botanised, exploring the landscape, discovering new plant records and passing them on to other botanists such as William How who published them in Phytologia Britannica (1650).30 Heaton, credited by the botanical scholar Charles Nelson to be the first person to have carried out a systematic study of the Irish flora, probably prepared a manuscript sometime before 1641. What became of it is unknown but it was certainly used by Caleb Threlkeld (1676–1728) in the formation of his own comprehensive study Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarum, published in 1726.31

Another early traveller to Ireland was Gédéon Bonnivert (fl.1673–1703), born at Sedan in Champagne, France, who came as one of a ‘troop of horse’ to join King William III’s army in Ireland for seven weeks in the summer of 1690. Bonnivert, a highly educated man, an enthusiastic scientist and eager botanist, corresponded with the eminent botanists Hans Sloane and Leonard Plukenet. Sloane (1660–1753), born in Killyleagh, Co. Down, founded the Chelsea Botanic Garden whose collections went on to form the nucleus of the future British Museum. In a letter dated 5 August 1703, Bonnivert wrote to Sloane:

‘… Near this Town [Limerick] in a bog call’d by ye name of Douglass grow aboundance of Plants, and amongst ’em a Pentaphyllum rubrum out of those bogs as I have seen fìrr trees wth their boughs and roots very sound timber, and wch is most admirable is that none of those trees grow in Ireland…’.32

Bonnivert sent Sloane and Plukenet plant specimens that he had gathered in Limerick, Cork, and elsewhere. These specimens, now residing in the Sloane Herbarium in the British Museum, represent the oldest known herbarium material of Irish origin.30

In 1682, some 30 years after Boate’s Irelands Naturall History was published, the London book publisher Moses Pitt proposed to put together an English Atlas which would include natural history of the regions. William Molyneux (1656–98), elder brother of the famous Thomas Molyneux (1661–1733) and ardent Baconian, was approached by Pitt to write the natural history of Ireland. Upon accepting, Molyneux sent out questionnaires, or Quareries, listing 16 questions to his contacts throughout Ireland. Unfortunately, the project collapsed in 1685 on the arrest of Pitt for non payment of debts and Molyneux burnt all that he had written himself, only sparing some rough notes which found their way into the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

One of Molyneux’s correspondents was the scholar and antiquarian Roderic O’Flaherty (1629–1718) who lived in west Galway and had written in 1684 a fine text about his region A Chorographical Description of West or H-Iar Connaught, which for unknown reasons had to wait for 162 years before it was edited by James Hardiman and then published by the Irish Archaeological Society in 1846.33 O’Flaherty was an accurate recorder and while his observations were generally restricted to Connemara they provide an important source of information to supplement the writings of Boate which covered a much broader geographical area.

‘The country is generally coarse, moorish, and mountanous, full of high rocky hills, large valleys, great bogs, some woods, whereof it had abundance before they were cut. It is replenished with rivers, brooks, lakes, and standing waters, even on the tops of the highest mountains. On the sea side there are many excellent large and safe harbours for ships to ride on anchor; the climate is wholsome, soe as divers attain to the age of ninety years, a hundred and upwards. The land produces wild beasts, as wolves, deere, foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, hares, rabbets, squirrells, martins, weesles and the amphibious otter, of which kind the white-faced otter is very rare. It is never killed, they say, but with loss of man or dog, and its skin is mighty precious. It admits no rats to live anywhere within it, except the Isles of Aran, and the district of the west liberties of Galway.’

The other section of O’Flaherty’s text directly relevant to the natural history of Ireland concerned the creatures and birds in the coastal waters off Connemara.

‘It now and then casts ashore great whales, gramps [dolphins], porcupisses, thunies [tuna]. Both sea and land have their severall kinds of birds. Here is a kind of black eagle, which kills the deere by grappling him with his claw, and forcing him to run headlong into precipices. Here the ganet soares high into the sky to espy his prey in the sea under him, at which he casts himself headlong into the sea, and swallows up whole herrings in a moresell. This bird flys through the ship’s sailes, piercing them with his beak. Here is the bird engendered by the sea out of timber long lying in the sea. Some call them clakes and soland-geese, some puffins, other bernacles, because they resemble them. We call them “girrinn”.’

Here we find again the enduring theory that some birds were descended from floating planks of wood, i.e. from the attached shellfish – something already encountered in the work of Cambrensis.

In the early 1680s, when O’Flaherty was writing his text, Ireland was in a scientific and intellectual torpor. Social and financial power were rooted in London with few benefits spreading westwards. A notable exception, from the first part of the century was the scholar James Ussher (1581–1656), who became Bishop of Meath in 1621 and four years later Archbishop of Armagh. His main contribution to natural history was to provide some scope for the belief in evolutionary theory rather than a catastrophic vision of the creation of the world. After careful study of the Old Testament he concluded that the world had begun ‘upon the entrance of the night preceding Sunday 23 October’ in the year 4004 BC.34 His chronology was incorporated into one of the Authorised Versions of the Bible in 1701 and henceforth was known as ‘The Received Chronology’ or ‘Bible Chronology’.35 That the world had existed for some 6,000 years posed many problems for those that believed in cataclysms. Apart from the sparkle of Usher and a few others there was little happening in the field of science in Ireland at that time. Indeed, K. Theodore Hoppen concluded that ‘the scientific scene in pre-restoration Ireland was one in which inertia, rather than movement, was quite clearly the dominant factor’.36

By the turn of the eighteenth century the trend set by Gerard Boate of recording Irish natural history more by direct observation than by hearsay was well established. Edward Lhwyd (1670–1709), the eminent Welsh natural historian and Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, visited Ireland briefly in 1699 in search of antiquities and natural history. He toured places which many present-day naturalists would put high on their visiting list: the mountains of Sligo, Mayo, Galway and Kerry; the Aran Islands, Co. Galway; the Burren, Co. Clare, and Co. Antrim. He recorded several new plants and reported his visit in a letter dated 25 August 1700 to his friend Tancred Robinson, Fellow of the Royal Society. It was printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society somewhat late in 1712.37

But the claim for writing the first original book on botany published in Ireland – Methodus plantarum, in horto medico collegii Dubinensis, jam jam disponendarum; In dua partes divisa; quarum prima de plantis, altera de fruiticibus & arboribus agit – must go to the first Professor of Botany at Trinity College Dublin, Henry Nicholson (c.l681–c.l721). Published in 1712, it is a catalogue of plants growing in the Physic Garden at Trinity; hardly a natural history treatise, but a step in the right direction.

Two years later appeared a remarkable work written by the naturalist-gamekeeper Arthur Stringer (c.l664–c.l728), who was employed by the Conway family on their estate east of Lough Neagh. The Experienc’d Huntsman was the first reliable text on the wild mammals of either Ireland or Britain. Strangely, it remained ‘undiscovered’ until James Fairley, whose attention had been brought to it by C. Douglas Deane (1914–92), Deputy Director of the Ulster Museum 1957–77 and ornithologist, encouraged its republication in 1977.38 Stringer had a genuine naturalist’s eye for the behaviour and habits of the wild mammals of his concern – deer, hares, foxes, badgers, martens and otters. All his observations ring true today despite his somewhat florid descriptions such as the entry for the badger, which he observed ‘is a very melancholy fat Creature, Sleeps incessantly, and naturally (when in Season) very Lecherous’.

Caleb Threlkeld: Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum 1726

The appearance in 1726 of Caleb Threlkeld’s Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum, the earliest Irish flora, represented a turning point in the history of natural history in Ireland.39 Threlkeld (1676–1728), an English Dissenting minister and physician, settled in Dublin in 1713, and compiled his flora from several sources, which he tapped to some varying and unclear degree. He probably used the Heaton manuscript mentioned earlier, but he also harnessed records from other naturalists such as William Sherard, founder of the Chair of Botany at Oxford University, who was based in Co. Down for four years. Sherard’s plant records were published in the second edition of John Ray’s Synopsis Methodica stirpium Britannicarum (1696),40 and then extracted by Threlkeld for his own work. Other information was gathered from William How’s work mentioned above, and finally Threlkeld used his own observations. Opinions differ as to the extent of Threlkeld’s personal input. Was he ‘A candid Author and plain Dealer’ as suggested by Nathaniel Colgan, author of the Flora of County Dublin,41 or just the opposite, i.e. a plagiariser, as suggested by Mitchell?42 Nelson contends that the bulk of the information in the book was generated by Threlkeld.43 The recent discovery of 22 sheets holding plant specimens in the Herbarium in Trinity College, Dublin, and very likely to have been the minister’s own collection from his Hortus Siccus, would support the latter’s hypothesis.44 The author’s preface in the Synopsis is clear about his own field work:

Caleb Threlkeld’s Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum (1726), the earliest Irish flora.

‘During the Summer Months I used to perambulate in Company of ingenious Men, both of the Clergy and Laity, to have ocular Demonstration of the Plants themselves in their native Soil, where Nature regaled our Senses with her Gaiety and Garnishes, which makes some resemblance of the paradisiacal State. From twelve Years Observations I collected Specimens for an Hortus Siccus, and set down Places where they grew, besides I made Inquiries of Ingenious Men, and now I have reduced our Plants into the Model you here see.’

An Irish Herbal

Following the appearance in 1525 of Bancks’ Herbal,45 the first printed herbal in English, named after the printer Richard Bancks, there was a succession of other herbals acting as vehicles for botanical information. But the herbalist’s era came to an end in 1735 when Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, the book that ushered in modern botany.46 The very same year, Ireland’s first herbal Botanalogia Universalis Hibernica by John K’Eogh (1681?–1754) was published in the city of Cork.47 Probably born in Co. Roscommon, K’Eogh was appointed Chaplain to James King, fourth Lord Kingston, and later obtained the living of Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. K’Eogh’s reason for writing the herbal was the daily viewing of his master’s gardens in which grew nearly 200 different species of herbs and trees. ‘I was not acquainted with any Garden, which could show so many, this was no small advantage, or Conveniency to forward this Undertaking.’ However, K’Eogh’s vision extended beyond the garden walls and comments on Irish localities and habitats of some of the listed plants are included in the herbal. A similar treatise followed in 1739 – Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica – on the medicinal properties of animals.48 In his preface, K’Eogh stated ‘My principal intention in publishing these treatises on vegetables and animals, was to contrive to cure all the diseases, which the natives of kingdom are afflicted with, by simple, easy, and safe methods, prepared either by pulverisation, decoction, infusion, distillation, etc.’. The frequent eating of the brains of sparrows ‘excite venery and clear the sight’. Powered otter testicles drunk in a liquid ‘help to cure the Epilepsy’; the fat of a heron, mixed with oil of amber, ‘being dropt warm into the ears, cures deafness’. K’Eogh acknowledges his debit to Horace (65 BC–AD 8), Pliny (d. AD 79), Avicenna (980–1037) Albertus Magnus (c.1280) and others for the preparation of the listed prescriptions. Unfortunately no natural history information is included along with the animals listed in the Zoologia.

Keogh’s Botanalogia Universalis Hibernica (1735) – a late herbal.

County natural histories and botanical works

The year 1744 marked the formation of the Physico-Historical Society of Ireland, some 13 years after the founding of the Dublin Society (later Royal Dublin Society). The learned gentlemen of the PHSI decided to prepare a series of monographs on the ‘ancient and present state’ of the counties. These contained lists of plants and often animals, essays on agriculture and descriptions of minerals, woodlands, etc. They can be considered harbingers of the county natural histories that blossomed in the later half of the nineteenth century.

John Rutty’s (1697–1775) An Essay Towards a Natural History of the County Dublin, published in 1772, was the first real county natural history in Ireland and dealt extensively with the flora, fauna, geology, meteorology, agriculture, water, minerals, air and soils of Dublin as well as the mortality of Dubliners.49 He ignored the Linnean system of binomial classification which was in the process of being widely adopted in England. Under international agreement the year 1758 was taken as the start date of this new nomenclature – first unveiled by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum in 1753 – whereby each species of plant or animal is described by two, sometimes three, Latin names. The Linnean system simplified matters. Thus Rutty’s long-winded scientific name for water mint – Mentha rotundifolia palustris seu aquatica major – would simply have been Mentha aquatica under the Linnean system. The binomial system meant that space was saved on paper at a time when printing costs were prohibitively high, and that names were easier to remember. Moreover, it provided a strong logical framework for all future advancement in the study of biology.

Soon after the adoption of the Linnean system some interesting early botanical investigations were undertaken by Patrick Browne (1720–90), from Woodstock, Co. Mayo, who attended Leyden University and became friendly with Linnaeus. He settled in Jamaica, practised as a medical doctor, and wrote The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica.50 His important manuscript, Fasciculus Plantarum Hiberniae, containing records of his botanical findings during 1788, made principally in Mayo (although he also investigated Co. Galway), lay dormant for about two centuries in the cupboards of the Linnean Society, London, before being published in 1996 as The Flowers of Mayo together with a commentary and extensive notes by Nelson and illustrations by Walsh.51 Browne also published important catalogues of the birds and fishes of Ireland in the Gentleman’s and London Magazine in 1774.52,53

Despite the advent of regional natural histories, Ireland still lagged behind in scientific matters. Progress was, of course, impeded by a lack of wealth, a poor institutional infrastructure, and often hazardous and difficult travel through the countryside. But towards the close of the century things were warming up in Dublin. One driving force behind the foundation of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, in 1795 was Walter Wade (fl.1770?–1825) who, a year earlier, had published Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum Indigenarum in Comitatu Dublinensi Inventarum. Pars Prima – a flora of Co. Dublin, the first Irish flora to be arranged according to the Linnean classification.54 Wade insisted on personally viewing each species before listing it. He also wrote several other texts including one on rare plants in Co. Galway, with a particular emphasis on Connemara, and he claimed to be the first serious visiting botanist there. His subsequent Plantae Rariores in Hibernia Inventae (1804) was a more ambitious cataloguing of flowering plants, including 55 new additions to his Dublin flora.55 Interest was now spreading beyond flowering plants, a point highlighted by the appearance in 1804 of Dawson Turner’s (1775–1858) Muscologiae Hibernicae Spicilegium,56 entirely devoted to the mosses of Ireland, all of which had either been seen by him growing in situ or had been sent to him by Irish correspondents including John Templeton from Cranmore, near Belfast, one of Ireland’s outstanding naturalists.