Welsh Journals

'THE BEST NATURALIST NOW IN EUROPE': EDWARD LHUYD, F.R.S. (1660-1709) by F. V. EMERY, M.A., B.Litt. STUDENTS of the life and work of Edward Lhuyd are obliged to lean heavily on the contemporary record of that omniscient Oxford observer, Thomas Hearne. Embedded in his narrative of university politics and his condemnation of the Whigs we find some rare biographical references to this distinguished Welshman.1 We learn, for instance, that by 1706 Hans Sloane (later President of the Royal Society) ranked Lhuyd as the best naturalist now in Europe', just as Lhuyd himself regarded John Ray, who had died two years previously, as 'the greatest naturalist of our age \2 The purpose of this article is to establish and interpret Lhuyd's international reputation as a scientist. At the outset, there is a certain danger in considering separately what we may nowadays term his scientific interests. It is unfortunate that Gunther and others after him regarded Lhuyd's attachment to botany, geology, and archaeology, together with his philological research, in terms of a series of self-sufficient phases within his career as a whole.3 It is more reasonable to see those four principal fields of study as constant themes, admittedly over-lapping one with the other in a complex and irregular way, but each of them leading and contributing to Lhuyd's unique pre-occupation with the Celtic (or British ') nations. These he traced from Scotland to Brittany, exploring the countries they inhabited in order both to reveal to the world at large their special riches in natural history plants, fossils, minerals and to understand them as the native territories of the Celtic peoples, whose languages, archaeology, and history were better known to him than to any of his contemporaries, or indeed his successors for two hundred years. As the only concise biography of Lhuyd was published sixty years ago (not without error), there is a case for selecting the main landmarks in his career before assessing his scientific achieve- ment.4 He entered Jesus College, Oxford, as a mature student in 1682, but very little is known of his first twenty-two years, which obviously were a formative period of crucial significance to his whole career. We know that he was Welsh to the core, his parents