Welsh Journals

Edward Lhuyd and 'A Natural History of Wales' This is an abbreviated version of a paper of the same title in the journal Studia Celtica (vol. 12/13) 1977/78 and is based on the J.B. Willans Memorial Lecture for 1974. All the footnotes and the majority of references have been omitted. It is perfectly understandable that in Wales Edward Lhuyd is best remembered as the first serious explorer of the relations between Welsh, Irish, and the other Celtic languages. At the same time, he enjoyed fame in his own lifetime as a natural historian. Contemporaries praised him as 'the best Naturalist now in Europe'. And it is on this (perhaps less familiar) aspect of his career that I wish to concentrate, by trying to project some substance into his unwritten book, intended by him as A Natural History of Wales. Whatever I say should be taken in the context of Lhuyd's immense versatility. He was an authority in many branches of learning, and in this he was by no means exceptional for his period. But it may bring home to us the full scope of his commitments if I say that, transposing our institutions back to his day, Lhuyd was a front-runner for the positions of Director of the National Museum of Wales; of Librarian at the National Library; of the Jesus Professorship of Celtic; of President of the Cambrians; and (probably) of the Curator of the Welsh Folk Museum as well. Not a bad record for one man, and I mean no disrespect (indeed, the opposite) to the incumbents of these positions when I say that Lhuyd, in effect and in his own setting, carried all five jobs himself. It is fairly easy to trace the origins of Lhuyd's reputation as a naturalist, so that he would have appeared to many scholars as the obvious man to write a Natural History of Wales. His earliest skills were in botany, and he had a precocious knowledge of rare plants growing in the Welsh mountains when he went to Oxford. Once there and assisting with the collections at the Ashmolean Museum, he taught himself the scientific business of classifying the hundreds of minerals, fossil shells, teeth, sponges, corals, and leaves that he also began to collect for himself, around Oxford and then further afield. His expertise in this growing science of palaeontology, linked as it was to theories of the Frank Emery origin of the Earth and of life upon it, commended him to such famous scholars as John Ray and Martin Lister. They in turn introduced him to their colleagues, and it was one of these, William Nicholson, who secured for Lhuyd his first chance to publish his researches. It is also fair to say that Nicholson and the others respected Lhuyd not only for his general expertise in natural history, but also for his particular knowledge of Wales, its mountains, and its language. At all events, Lhuyd's name was made by his work on Wales in the new edition of Camden's Britannia, published in 1695, which crystallized his ideas and showed him how such studies could be accomplished with the help of questionnaires and field-work. (All the better, then, that Lhuyd's original manuscript for the Britannia, marking a turning-point in his career, should have been discovered recently by Mr. Gwyn Walters in the Cardiff City Library.) Its publication encouraged his friends in Jesus College, Oxford, and throughout Wales, and in particular a group of Glamorgan gentlemen, to finance a programme of research for him with the end-product being an ambitious book on the natural history, antiquities, geography, and language of Wales. This led to what he called 'the fatigue of five years' travels through the most retired parts of Her Majesty's Kingdoms', chiefly in Wales, but extending to the Scottish Highlands, western Ireland, Cornwall, and the north coast of Brittany. Perhaps we may note here, on the sponsorship of his work, that the Mansels and other Glamorgan gentry could have had an eye not only to furthering natural knowledge but also (as Dr. Moelwyn Williams points out) to benefiting from Lhuyd's expert surveying of coal, iron, and other mineral resources in which they were interested financially, as early industrialists (Williams, 1969). It seems to me that an obvious place in which to begin looking for Lhuyd's intentions in writing his Natural History of Wales what he hoped to put into the book is the questionnaire printed by him at the very outset. By distributing copies in every Welsh parish, he aimed at collecting first-hand information and data across a wide range of topics. He was not (as sometimes claimed) an originator of this methodical use of questionnaires. This idea of