Welsh Journals

EDWARD LHUYD AND SOME OF HIS GLAMORGAN CORRESPONDENTS: A VIEW OF GOWER IN THE 1690s by F. V. EMERY, M.A., B.Litt., Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford IT is tempting, but misleading, to regard Edward Lhuyd's career from an episodic point-of-view. This is done, for instance, in The Dictionary of Welsh Biography, where, after the fair assumption that his subjects of study became ever wider and more com- plex the progression within his Oxford work is made out to be as follows: first, in the period prior to his appointment as Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum (1691), his chief subject of study was botany"; secondly, at that point, "there was a change in his interests now he began to devote himself more and more to stones and fossils thirdly, after 1693 we see another change in the nature of his researches. Henceforth his main interest was to be in antiquities and philology In spite of some qualifications, these remarks suggest that it is valid to think of Lhuyd in such hard-and- fast terms, and to assume that he made his pioneer contributions episodically and in turn in each of the separate provinces of botany, geology, antiquities, and philology. Agreed, it is difficult to do justice in half-a-dozen paragraphs to the manifold energies of a polymath like Lhuyd, and changes of emphasis are indeed likely to take place in the course of an undistracted professional life of nearly thirty years. But if Lhuyd's vast correspondence reveals anything at all it is that they were merely changes of degree, not of kind, within his four principal fields of study. Far too slender a volume of his letters is in print to permit agreement, let alone certainty, that the changes did in fact follow the pattern and sequence already suggested. An indissoluble part of the problem is best put as a further question: why did such changes take place? What influences were at work in Lhuyd's life when they are supposed to have occurred? It seems impossible to consider Lhuyd apart from at least two forms of extraneous influence: first, his studies (like those of his renowned colleagues and associates, Ray, Lister or Nicolson) were not pursued in isolation but were discussed, tested, and extended by members of his large circle of correspondents and helpers; secondly, when it came to the point of crystallizing some of this work in the form of