‘… 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