The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History

By David Elliston Allen

At once a major resource for historians of science and an excellent introduction to natural history for the general reader, David Allen's The Naturalist in Britain established a precedent for investigating natural history as a social phenomenon. Here the author traces the evolution of natural history from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, from the "herbalizings" of apprentice apothecaries to the establishment of national reserves and international societies to the emergence of natural history as an organized discipline. Along the way he describes the role of scientific ideas, popular fashion, religious motivations, literary influences, the increase of leisure time and disposable income, and the tendency of like-minded persons to form clubs. His comprehensive and entertaining discussion creates a vibrant portrait of a scientific movement inextricably woven into a particular culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400843442

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THE NATURALIST IN BRITAIN

THE NATURALIST IN BRITAIN

A SOCIAL HISTORY

David Elliston Allen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS    PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom by Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 1976 by David Elliston Allen

All Rights Reserved

Originally published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books;

second edition, with corrections and new preface, published by

Princeton University Press, 1994

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Allen, David Elliston.

The naturalist in Britain : a social history / David Elliston Allen.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : A. Lane. 1976.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-03628-4 (CL) ISBN 0-691-03632-2 (PA)

eISBN 978-1-400-84344-2

1. Natural history—Great Britain—History. 2. Naturalists—Great

Britain—History. I. Title.

QH137.A57 1994

508.41'09—dc2093-43900

R0

To Clare

ALL THE FACTS IN NATURAL HISTORY,

TAKEN BY THEMSELVES, HAVE NO VALUE,

BUT ARE BARREN LIKE A SINGLE SEX.

BUT MARRY IT TO HUMAN HISTORY,

AND IT IS FULL OF LIFE.

Emerson, Address on Nature’, 1836

Contents

List of Plates xi

List of Illustrations xiii

Preface (1994) xv

Preface to the First Edition xvii

Chapter One

Organization Begins 3

Chapter Two

The Rise to Fashion 22

Chapter Three

Wonders of the Past 45

Chapter Four

The Victorian Setting 64

Chapter Five

The Fruits of Efficiency 83

Chapter Six

Exploring the Fringes 108

Chapter Seven

Deadlier Weapons 126

Chapter Eight

The Field Club 142

Chapter Nine

The Parting of the Ways 158

Chapter Ten

Dispersed Efforts 175

Chapter Eleven

Recovery on the Coasts 186

Chapter Twelve

An Infusion of Mobility 202

Chapter Thirteen

A Break for Play 220

Chapter Fourteen

The Eventual Combining

Notes on Sources 245

Index 257

List of Plates

1. Insect-collecting in the 1760s. Hand-painted frontispiece to Moses Harris, The Aurelian, 1765

2. William Buckland equipped as a glacialist, from Sir Archibald Geikie, Life of Sir R. I. Murchison, 1875

3. The rapaciousness of Fashion, from Punch, May 1892

4. Children’s playing cards, c. 1843 (The London Museum)

5. ‘Seaside Sirens’ (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)

6. ‘Collecting Ferns’, from the Illustrated London News, July 1871 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)

7. An excursion of the Liverpool Naturalists’ Field Club, 1860

8. First admission of lady Fellows to the Linnean Society of London, 1905. Painting by James Sant, R.A. (Linnean Soczety of London)

9. Members of the British Pteridological Society on their annual excursion, 1900. (British Pteridological Society)

10. The photographic gun, from Le Nature, 1882

11. Bird photography under difficulties, from R. Kearton, Wild Life at Home, 1899

12. G. C. Druce (standing), with members of the Ashmolean Natural History Society, 1904 (Ashmolean Natural History Society)

13. Nature Study class, 1923 (Radio Times Hulton Picture Library)

List of Illustrations

Capturing insects, 1839, from History of Insects, 1839 (Anon.) (Linnean Society of London)

Geological field-work in the 1840s, from Memoirs of the Geological Survey, 1846 (Institute of Geological Sciences)

The dandelion. Engraving by Thomas Bewick, from Thomas Hugo, Bewick’s Woodcuts, 1870 (Linnean Society of London)

Part of the Linnaean sexual system of plants, from James Lee, An Introduction to Botany, 1776 (Linnean Society of London)

Geological tools (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Victorian urn, from Philip Henry Gosse, An Introduction to Zoology, vol. II (Linnean Society of London)

Magpie moth, from The Royal Natural History, vol. VI, 1896 (Linnean Society of London)

Herring gull, from The Royal Natural History, vol. IV, 1895 (Linnean Society of London)

Equipment for trapping and laying out butterflies and insects (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Leicester in the 1870s, from F. S. Williams, The Midland Railway, 1877 (Science Museum Library)

A four-man microscope, from Dionysius Lardner, The Microscope, 1856 (Linnean Society of London)

Field glasses, from an advertisement from 19175 (Science Museum Library)

Naturalists dredging off Whitenose, from Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium, 1854 (Linnean Society of London)

A country club run, from Viscount Bury and G. Lacy Hillier, Cycling, 1887 (Science Museum Library)

A weekend in the country, from The Motor, March 1927 (Science Museum Library)

The birdwatcher’s field equipment, from C. F. Tunnicliffe, Bird Portraiture, 1945 (Linnean Society of London)

Preface (1994)

WHEN this book was first published, almost twenty years ago, I expected it to find its readership mainly among fellow naturalists—for whom I had primarily intended the book all along. It had not occurred to me that it filled what at that time was a rather gaping hole in the literature of the history of science, and that it would consequently receive a welcome from that academic quarter too. It came as a particular surprise, however, that many of those academic readers proved to be across the Atlantic, for I had supposed the subject matter likely to be of interest only to inhabitants of Britain and Ireland.

By a double piece of good fortune, historians of science had not only largely failed to penentrate to this farther part of their field until then, they were also deep in a debate about how much attention should rightly be given to the social context in which scientific ideas have developed. Unwittingly, I had produced a work which was modish, even provocative, in identifying itself wholeheartedly with the externalist point of view.

In the years since, history of science has increasingly shifted its gaze to biology and natural history, particularly to their more recent periods. Journals devoted to this area of the subject have made their appearance, and numerous hitherto-neglected corners—the birth of plant ecology is but one outstanding example—have at last come in for scholarly study. As a result, our knowledge of some of the matters treated in this book has been considerably widened and deepened, though it is probably fair to claim that the broad outline of the story has not been modified in any very significant respect. Certain chapters, indeed, can still stand essentially as they were written; however, the most unsatisfactory is undoubtedly Chapter Three, which even when it appeared did less than justice, I have long been conscious, to the work of the especially numerous and prolific historians of geology.

Unfortunately, for a long time now copies of the book have been unobtainable (in English-speaking countries, that is; a Japanese edition came out in 1990). In the U.S. they were almost impossible to come by from the very first. Yet to judge from the number of inquiries, especially from outside Britain, there apparently continue to be many who would like to have a copy for their personal shelves. In view of this I trust it will not be thought presumptuously early for the work to be brought before the public again.

Preface to the First Edition

THIS BOOK arose out of a small exhibit that I prepared for a conference of the Botanical Society of the British Isles in the spring of 1952. In this I attempted an analysis of how the Society’s membership had altered in its social composition down the years, and was at once struck by the faithfulness with which broad national trends had evidently been reflected in this miniature world.

Some of these trends were clearly social ones, in the narrow meaning of that word. But others seemed to be the product of no more than changes in Taste—suggesting that the elusive entity that we term ‘the spirit of the age’ is capable of leaving its imprint even on subjects conventionally thought of as purely objective. The implication was that even quite transitory shifts within society at large might have a far greater influence than anyone appeared to have suggested on the development of areas of science more especially exposed to them. Social forces and fashion, in other words, might exert a gravitational pull, deflecting energies and helping to abort or delay a particular science’s advance. For this reason the study of the past development of subjects like botany and zoology appeared to demand a very much wider perspective than it is customarily accorded. Indeed, only by such an approach did it seem that the true character of ‘natural history’ could be captured and encompassed. Finding nothing in the literature along these lines, I decided to take up the challenge.

The task proved formidable. Little or nothing, it emerged, had been published on great areas of the field, and much primary research was unavoidable. However, as anyone will know who has browsed through the writings of earlier naturalists and, in particular, turned the pages of those delightful, now largely forgotten periodicals, this has been more of a pleasure than a labour—even if, at times, it seemed to have no end. For the amount of written matter apparently worth sifting is infinite and the nuggets worthy of extraction are few. Natural history literature is of a kind from which it is peculiarly difficult to quarry ‘social’ detail. The main mass, devoted to field observations or long lists of species, is ever on its guard against just those more mundane remarks of value to the social historian. It is usually only where it has been allowed to ‘leak’—in the more chatty periodicals, the more sharply etched obituaries, the more graphic accounts of meetings and excursions, in certain inaugural lectures and presidential addresses, above all in the far too rare published collections of letters and private journals and volumes of reminiscences—that one can pick up clues to how naturalists of former times worked and walked and ate, whom they mixed with, and why they noted some things and missed a great deal else altogether. In truth, this might be dubbed more aptly the archaeology of natural history: the piecing together of the living reality of the past from the merest unintended fragments.

Concentrating on the purely social also brings its own distortion. Not all naturalists are or ever have been sociable; and an account focused on collective endeavour cannot but understate the often very important contribution made by those working right away from the highroads of the subject. At times the role of these lone individuals has even been crucial, as they pioneered new fields or methods which later became general. If too little is said about such people in these pages, it is not that their achievements are unappreciated: it is merely that they lie outside the intrinsic scope of the book.

The 'Britain’ of the title is in effect the whole of the British Isles, for Ireland’s natural history cannot justifiably be treated as an independent entity. 'Naturalist’ and 'natural history’, similarly, I have preferred to use in their convenient vagueness. To have attempted to define them more precisely would have required another chapter to the book. The terms, in any case, have shifted in their meaning over time and even today are applied in more than a single sense. I have been content to take them as covering roughly what we today understand by ecology and systematics ('the diversity and inter-relationships of organisms’, in the words of the Aims of the Linnean Society of London—but extending this to the geological aspects of scenery) and as made up of the range of sciences still embraced by the British Museum (Natural History). But, as will be evident from the pages that follow, I do not think natural history can be truly interpreted by a simplistic equation with one or more aspects of scientific inquiry in particular; moreover, the very act of observing natural objects involves a strong aesthetic element which interpenetrates the scientific. It is this dual character, surely, which accounts for so much of the subject’s special fascination—and which in this age of the Two Cultures gives it an especial importance.

A book so long in generation inevitably accumulates down the years a sizeable moraine of indebtedness, far too large to be picked through in all its individual terms. There are one or two, even so, who must be singled out for thanking in particular: Dr W. S. Bristowe, Mr R. S. R. Fitter and Mr J. E. Lousley, for undertaking the onerous task of reading through the entire manuscript and giving me the benefit of their comments; Professor and Mrs Joseph Ewan and Professor G. S. Rousseau, for taking time off during all-too-brief visits to this country to bring their unrivalled expertise to bear on the early chapters; Miss Margaret Deacon, for similarly scrutinizing Chapters Six and Eleven in the light of her extensive knowledge of the history of oceanography; Dr Averil Lysaght and Dr W. E. Swinton, for reading through an early draft of Chapter Eight—and, even more, for their words of encouragement at a time when the project was flagging; Mr G. D. R. Bridson, Professor E. L. Jones, Miss Sandra Raphael, Dr R. S. Wilkinson and other fellow historians of the subject too numerous to mention, for the stimulating discussions I have enjoyed with them and for the fresh insights and leads to additional material that they have invariably provided. I also owe a very special debt of gratitude to Mr J. S. L. Gilmour, for the loan long ago of his manuscript notes on the history of local floras—and thereby, quite unwittingly, for the first opening of my eyes to the possibilities that have eventually found their embodiment in this book. I would not want to omit from this list, too, those libraries in which it has been my privilege principally to work: the London Library, Birmingham City Reference Library, the library of the Linnean Society of London and, above all, the various libraries of the British Museum (Natural History), for access to whose inexhaustible riches, like many another outsider before me, I shall always be profoundly grateful. Finally, I thank my wife for her help and patience during the closing stages.

D.E.A.

THE NATURALIST IN BRITAIN

CHAPTER ONE

Organization Begins

THERE comes a point in the history of every pursuit at which its following becomes sufficient to entitle it to be termed a social activity. At this stage it begins to acquire some substance. It takes on a life over and above that of its individual adherents and through the pattern of its own development starts to influence, and sometimes even govern, the way in which they think and act.

For natural history in Britain this point was reached some time in the course of the seventeenth century. For long before then, to be sure, naturalists had existed; but they had been few and scattered and had necessarily worked in isolation. They had seldom had others near by whose help could be invoked and who could be counted on to share their keenness, and there had not ordinarily been any means of knowing what was being discovered elsewhere except by continual and often importunate correspondence or by the regular acquisition of large numbers of extremely expensive books. After 1600 the first decisive steps began to be taken towards a more formalized coming-together. By the end of that century the earliest society that we know of exclusively devoted to the subject had been born—a legacy in part of that great new surge of disinterested inquiry that characterized what we now know as the Enlightenment—and the key items of field equipment of the principal constituent studies were also beginning to appear. The first known mention of the geologist’s hammer is in 1696; botanists were carrying collecting-tins (or ‘vascula’) by 1704; the butterfly-net was in use by 1711. Called into being by the elementary requirements of their respective pursuits, all three doubtless fulfilled as well from the first their time-honoured role as group-emblems, providing for their users both a means of mutual recognition and a sense of collective identity. Only just preceding them had come the first standard works of identification on the more conspicuous of the country’s animals and plants: Francis Willoughby’s—or, more accurately, John Ray’s—Ornithologia (brought out, significantly, in an English translation in 1678, two years after its original publication), Ray’s own Catalogus Plant arum Angliae and its long-copied successor, the Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum, and Martin Lister’s Historiae Animalium Angliae. For the local worker there were already Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire and Natural History of Staffordshire to serve as a stimulating model of what could be accomplished merely close at hand, and in James Petiver’s little pamphlets, Memoirs for the Curious, the first sign is even recognizable of the emergence of a deliberately more popular literature. The launching by the Royal Society in 1665 of its Philosophical Transactions—and almost simultaneously of the Journal des Savants on the Continent—had also proved the value of the specialist journal as a means of scientific communication and accustomed the leaders of learning to its use.

It was in botany that the first and greatest strides in these directions had been achieved. The study of plants had obvious practical applications for the infant science of medicine, and as a result of this, alone of the various branches of natural history, could count at this time on organized support from a professional quarter. It lent itself the most readily, moreover, to pursuit in the field in groups and could be carried out without incurring excessive embarrassment or attracting much suspicion. Not surprisingly, therefore, of the earliest specialist societies of which a mention has come down to us all but one were botanical—and most of these were brought into being from motives that were more vocational, or even monetary, than purely scientific. We owe it to the needs of the trade, in fact, that the first substantial numbers of persons were brought together from amongst whom, more or less by accident, the first permanent social nexus of naturalists was enabled to emerge. And it was ostensibly for profit to the pocket, rather than to the senses or the head, that most of them were first introduced to the delights of exploring and investigating.

The agency that we have to thank for this is the Society of Apothecaries, one of the old-established livery companies of the City of London. The primary purpose of this body was to exercise control over the practice there of what we should nowadays recognize as the greater part of the twin professions of medicine and pharmacy. In theory—though, especially latterly, by no means always in practice—only a Freeman of this Society was permitted to trade as an apothecary in the City and within a radius of seven miles; and in order to become a Freeman, it was normally necessary to have served a seven- or eight-year apprenticeship. Apprentices were usually bound at about thirteen or fourteen and learned on the job, accompanying their masters on their rounds and performing a great deal of routine drudgery. Only when they had gained their Freedom were they permitted to marry. Compared with the general run of livery companies, the Society was small and fairly intimate: its members, who functioned essentially as the general practitioners of those days (leaving the physicians to cater for the upper reaches of society, after the manner of consultants), were jealous of their skills and rightly demanded high standards of all would-be entrants. Accordingly, as the culmination of their training, the apprentices were required to undergo stiff tests in order to satisfy the Society of their general proficiency. One of these, not unexpectedly, was in the correct recognition of the 'simples', or drug plants, that formed the raw material of their trade; and as these needed to be known in the fresh state, the Society had to take it upon itself to maintain a botanic garden—latterly the famous Physic Garden at Chelsea, established in 1673 and still flourishing today—and to organize special 'herbarizings’, or field excursions into the countryside, on which the apprentices could be duly instructed in locating in the wild the commoner species then in use in medicine.

The earliest of these excursions that can be traced in the Society’s records was in May 1620—the year in which the Mayflower set sail for America. The Simpling Day that month was fixed to start at five o’clock in the morning—a quite normal time for apprentices to be up and about—and the rendezvous was to be at St Paul’s. After some time the number of these excursions was increased to six a year, one in each month from April to September. The first in each season was always led by the Master of the Society, who personally bore the cost of providing the evening’s dinner; while the one in July, known as the 'General Herbarizing’, was traditionally much more elaborate, being attended by large numbers of the Freemen and rounded off with an impressive banquet, at which the star turn was always a haunch of venison (and from which, it is presumed, the apprentices were debarred, if only by the high contribution towards their cost levied on those attending). For this grand occasion the Society’s ceremonial barge was also regularly brought into use, at least in the eighteenth century, and in one year, 1749, even a band of musicians was hired—though not without recriminations afterwards over the absurd extravagance of such a gesture.

The excursions were conducted at first by a senior member of the Society with a personal enthusiasm for botany; but in later years, as the supply of willing volunteers for the task no doubt became unreliable, a special paid official came to be appointed for the purpose, at an annual salary of £10, with the title of Demonstrator of Plants. In addition to this duty he was required to take up his stand in the Garden every last Wednesday in each summer month and, in the manner long customary in physic gardens designed for teaching, to expound the names and uses of the more important plants. He needed, clearly, to be someone with a reasonable knowledge. At the same time it was almost more essential that he should be capable of exercising firmness of discipline. For the apprentices, it seems, accustomed to being worked very hard, found these breaks from routine rather dangerously heady, and the excursions, unless strictly supervised, tended to become unruly. In 1724, for example, the committee responsible for organizing them noted in its minute-book that 'severall complaints have of late been made of disorders frequently happening on the day appointed for the private herbarizing’ and laid down that in future any apprentice wishing to attend must bring with him a permit from his master, while non-members of the Society would only be allowed on them if known to and approved by the Leader. For a time this tightening-up doubtless had the desired effect. By 1767, however, after the scholarly but over-mild William Hudson had been appointed Demonstrator, a fresh deterioration appears to have taken place. For in that year certain Freemen of the Society complained that they had been deterred from sending their apprentices 'to the Lectures and Botannick Walks, so often as they would have done, by the Irregularity and indecent Behaviour of some Persons who have frequented those Walks, fearing their own apprentices might be corrupted by such Examples’.

Subsequent holders of the office fortunately coped better. William Curtis, like Hudson a botanist of national reputation, was a person of drive and evidently infectious enthusiasm. His comparatively brief stay of four years must have done much to repair the tradition. On his departure in 1777, his place was taken by the redoubtable Thomas Wheeler, a born teacher, who succeeded over a very long period of years in building up the ‘Herbarizings’ to such a pitch of popularity that they came to take on the character almost of a sacred ritual. Some rather picturesque accounts of his later years have happily come down to us: they depict Wheeler turning up, ever predictably, in an old hat, very threadbare suit and a pair of long leather gaiters; and, even though by then well into his seventies, putting everyone to shame by his inexhaustible good spirits and agility. But even this was not sufficient to save the excursions indefinitely. In 1834 it was reluctantly decided that London’s fast-growing sprawl rendered them no longer practicable, and except for the single, never primarily instructional Grand Herbarizing (which lingered on for some years further) they were finally abandoned.

These excursions, without any doubt, were the major seminal influence in the establishment of the great field tradition that forms the core of modern natural history. Apart from the many field botanists who owed to them their first introduction to the subject, they were important for a wide variety of institutions and usages to which in one way or another they gave rise by their example. For the Apothecaries, by dint of many years of trial and error, had succeeded in evolving a sort of magic formula: a near-perfect blend of helpful 'live’ instruction, healthy, purposeful exercise and large-scale, unstrained good companionship.

Their first fruitful by-product had come into being almost at the outset. This was the band of keen young workers, almost all of them, apparently, one-time apprentices in the Society, who in the years 1629-39 made the earliest collective sweeps across Southern England and Wales in search of plants under the leadership of an energetic Yorkshireman, Thomas Johnson, an apothecary in Snow Hill. Best known for his able revision of Gerard’s Herball and for the delightful, detailed accounts of some of these excursions—the earliest local lists—that he fortunately preserved for us in print, Johnson was a friend of the country’s other foremost botanists, such as John Goodyer and John Parkinson, and was just the kind of man, of obvious organizing ability and abundant drive, who might well have created the first permanent formal body exclusively devoted to the study of our native flora and fauna. In the event his tragic death in the Civil War, at the early age of forty or thereabouts, put paid to any such likelihood.

The founding of the Royal Society of London, within twenty years of Johnson’s death, was no real substitute. For all the brilliance of its members, the great breadth of its concerns allowed little room for specialized interests of this nature. It was, besides, chair-bound on the whole, and favoured lofty speculation rather than grubbing in the field for data. For isolated workers, of whom John Ray is the outstanding example, it did provide an intellectual communications centre of the greatest comfort and assistance. Certainly, too, it fostered a most impressive outburst of scientific effort; it lent its prestige to secure the publication of many much-needed books; it gave the study of subjects such as botany and zoology a social standing and an air of respectability that before then they had scarcely known. But for all this its influence on the course of organized natural history was little more than marginal—except in one respect: it served at last to bring together most of the leading botanists in the country and then, by reason of its very catholicity, pushed them into taking intellectual refuge in the more specialized company of one another. Thus was born in or about 1698, as an unofficial outgrowth, a 'Temple Coffee House Botanic Club’, the earliest natural history society in Britain and probably in the world.

This was no ordinary club. For a start it had, apparently, no formal organization, such as officers and rules: it functioned, it seems, as little more than a loose coterie of friends. Perhaps because of this unofficial character no mention of it appears to have found its way into print; and it was only when the correspondence of its members came to be thoroughly scrutinized within the last few years that its existence was revealed. To have been invited along to the Coffee House for one of the Club’s regular Friday evening meetings must have been a singularly stimulating experience —and a good deal more rewarding, in view of the intellectual climate of the time, than attending a session of some latter-day natural history dining-club. It was more than a dining-club, in any case; for it also made excursions to places of interest in and around London.

Several members of the Club, including Petiver, Buddle and Doody, who made many plant-hunting expeditions together round London in the early years of the new century, also attended the Herbarizings of the Apothecaries as often as they could. A notebook of Doody’s has survived in which he has jotted down as a reminder the dates of the 'herberizing dayes’ for 1687—8; and in one of the many references to them in the letters of the period Petiver can be found writing in September 1712 of the last one of that season having ended up, as usual, at Chelsea, "where we dined at the Swan’. The excursions of the Botanic Club, which must have alternated with those of the Apothecaries and ranged on occasion a good way into Kent, could thus hardly have helped but be influenced by their example.

A close parallel to the Apothecaries’ field tradition, in the meantime, had appeared in Scotland (then still an independent country). Not long after 1670 the city of Edinburgh had been prevailed upon by two of its leading physicians to set aside a piece of ground as a public botanic garden, freely consultable by all local medical men, and to vote funds for its support out of the revenues of the University. James Sutherland, a keen young botanist in his thirties, was appointed Intendant and, as he relates in his catalogue of the garden published in 1683, his duties extended to making numerous field excursions for the purpose of building up its stock of medicinal plants. It is possible that on some of these he was accompanied by numbers of pupils, after the Chelsea pattern. There is no record of anything of this kind, however, before 1695, when a special act was passed authorizing Sutherland to instruct the apprentices of the College of Surgeons at 'a solemn publick herborizing in the fields four severall times every year’. This sounds suspiciously like a straightforward borrowing from the London Apothecaries. We know that the two Gardens were frequently in touch, and it is hard to believe that no reports had filtered north of the London Herbarizings and their continuing value and vitality.

How long the tradition persisted, once established by Sutherland, is uncertain. For the whole of the period from 1695 to 1800 there is no clear evidence that teaching excursions were still being undertaken by either the University or the Garden, but until the contemporary correspondence has been more exhaustively examined it is unsafe to assume that this mere lack of trace necessarily implies their nonexistence. But if it was the case that the tradition here proved abortive, it is not hard to find one very likely reason: the sudden break in direction that occurred in the time of Sutherland’s successor, the ill-fated William Arthur. Deeply implicated—unlikely though it seemed—in the Jacobite rising of 1715, this hapless man had no alternative but to flee both the Garden and Scotland when it collapsed, never to succeed in returning.

Another victim, apparently, of the Jacobite débâcle was Patrick Blair, a local apothecary of wide scientific interests and manifest ability, who early created a considerable stir by dissecting an elephant and then reconstructing and mounting the skeleton from its bones. By 1712 he had gained a doctorate from Aberdeen and was corresponding with several of the leading figures of the day; including Boerhaave, the great teacher of medicine and botany at Leyden. What was clearly destined to be a useful and influential career was at that point utterly shattered by the fateful events of 1715. Impressed—as he maintained, against his will—into the Jacobite army and later convicted of complicity when the rising was crushed, he found himself torn away from his home and background and sentenced to a term in Newgate Prison. He emerged a ruined man, and lived for a time in London in great poverty. Some years later, in 1720, he was appointed Physician to the Port of Boston, in Lincolnshire, and contrived in some degree to put his fortunes in repair. Here he resumed his natural history interests and, for all we know, may well have finished his career as he began it: as a member of a local botanic club for one had been founded in that town, by a coincidence, some years earlier by William Stukeley, the famous antiquary. ‘The apothecarys and I’, Stukeley later recalled in his memoirs, ‘went out a simpling once a week. We bought Ray’s 3 folios of a joint stock’. But, as usual, we are not told how long this club succeeded in surviving.

One of the people to befriend the exiled Blair in his hardest days in London was the young son of a wealthy City merchant, named John Martyn. Martyn had developed a passion for natural history—and more particularly for botany—in the course of his teens, and by the age of twenty had already made the acquaintance of many of the experts in the subject at the time living in the Metropolis. This led to his being invited to join in the excursions of the Apothecaries and this, in turn, to his making friends with the keener of the apprentices. The idea then arose of forming a separate botanical society (conceivably suggested by Blair, in the light of his onetime efforts at Dundee), to cater for the apprentices and others who wanted to pursue the subject somewhat more thoroughly; and this was duly brought into being, with all the necessary formalities, late in 1721. Thanks to the printed collections of Martyn’s son, published in 1770, and to the lucky preservation of one of its minute-books, this is a body about which we know a considerable amount. We know that it held together till the end of 1726. We know it had a president—to begin with the German botanist, J. J. Dillenius, who had just been brought over by James Sherard to work on his Pinax (and who was thus, apparently, the first person in history to enjoy full-time paid employment as a taxonomist)—a secretary, in the person of Martyn, and also a full-scale set of rules. We know the meetings were held every Saturday at six in the evening, at first in the Rainbow Coffee House in Watling Street and later in the home of one of the members. And we know that at these, in accordance with the rules, every member in turn had to exhibit a specified number of plants, give their names and make observations on their uses: in other words, every member his own Demonstrator of Plants. The names of twenty-three of these members (probably the full total) have come down to us and, because of their known connection with botany or medicine, it has recently proved possible to identify all but two of them with reasonable certainty. They turn out to have been, as one might well have expected, mostly very young: of those whose age can be established all but six were under twenty-five in the year of the Society’s founding. The only two verging on middle age—apart from the president—evidently preferred to keep in the background. It was thus a typical students’ association. It also had a strongly vocational impetus: one third were destined to be apothecaries, one third physicians, most of the rest surgeons or surgeon-apothecaries. And if their subsequent careers are anything to go by, they were well above average in intelligence—though few in actual fact made any very useful contributions to botanical knowledge in later years. Perhaps most interesting of all, they originated for the most part from what Coleridge was later to term the ‘clerisy’, that segment of society that lives by its intellectual skills and predominantly guides it by its thinking. Three, possibly five, were sons of clergymen—significantly Dissenters as often as Anglican parsons, presaging the vital role about to be played in English higher education by the dissenting academies—five followed fathers who were medical men already, two had uncles at the Bar, and two exemplified the growing tradition for the landed gentry to place their younger sons in a learned profession. Only the teaching profession was under-represented.

Apart from Philip Miller, who was in charge of the Chelsea Garden and thus straddled the worlds of both medicine and horticulture, Martyn’s Botanical Society shared no members with another small contemporary body, the Society of Gardeners, which was composed exclusively of London nurserymen and met at Newhall’s Coffee House in Chelsea. Nor was there any overlap, perhaps more surprisingly (for naturalists in those days were so frequently all-rounders), with the handful of individuals named—amongst others—in the preface to Benjamin Wilkes’s The English Moths and Butterflies (1748—9), who probably constituted the nucleus of the earliest-known specialist body in the field of zoology, the Society of Aurelians.

The Aurelians—as the lepidopterists of those days liked to call themselves (from the golden chrysalis, or aureolus, of a certain kind of butterfly)—were clearly less numerous than the botanists and lagged a good way behind