Martin Lister and Lincolnshire natural history : Presidential address to the Lincolnshire Naturalists' Union, 1927 / [H.W. Kew].

  • Harry Wallis Kew
Date:
[1927]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Martin Lister and Lincolnshire natural history : Presidential address to the Lincolnshire Naturalists' Union, 1927 / [H.W. Kew]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Old Palace Yard. He had, it seems, opportunities for service at the Court of King Charles II (as afterwards at that of King James II) among the domestic physicians.* In 1684, the University of Oxford declared him M.D., and he was admitted Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians three years later. Yet he delighted most in philosophy, and even now, in the midst of his successes, he was hard at work on the biggest of his books : ‘ Historia sive Synopsis Methodica Conchyliorum 1685-92 [-97], which by William Turton was aptly described as a stupendous effort of genius and industry. The Royal Society, at the first opportunity, elected him to its Council with Sir Christopher Wren, Dr. Grew, Mr. Flamsteed, Mr. Halley, and others. In 1685, he was sworn Vice-President; Samuel Pepys, the President, usually leaving * Dr. Lister in the chair’ during that year. He then urged the Society to print Willughby’s History of Fishes; and was of the Committee with Ray and others for that undertaking. Moreover he continued to present to the Society (for the Philosophical Transactions) numerous and very diverse papers of his own. By his proposal of 1684 that maps of the soils of countries be designed, he made the first known suggestion for the construc¬ tion of geological maps. Such maps he thought would well repay the trouble ; but he left them, as he said, to the industry of future times. No doubt the great Historia mostly occupied him, and it is by that work that he is best known. It was a prodigious collection of copper-plates of Shells (with tables of classification, &c.) mostly from drawings ably executed by his daughters Susanna and Anna, whose names have well deserved to descend to posterity with their father’s. To the thousand and more plates of Shells were added others of the structure of the animals belonging to Lister’s three separate ‘ Exercita- tiones Anatomicae ’ 1694-96; and he tells us that the work * To the Court Sir Matthew Lister (great-uncle), Susanna Lady Lister (mother), Frances Jennings (half-sister) and her daughter Frances after¬ wards Duchess of Tyrconnel had been no strangers. Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (sister of the younger Frances) * when Anne wore the crown ’ certainly influenced her ' Uncle Lister’s ’ later preferments. Her friendship with the Princess Anne, afterwards Queen, was already notorious.
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