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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    altogether took him up ten years at least, and that it cost him near ^2,000 out of his private purse. In 1694 and later he published ‘ Sex Exercitationes Medi- cinales ’ and other physic-books. But they were against the grain ; the Doctor’s great desire being to pursue philosophy among the inferior sort of things. His Anatomies of the Snails (now that he regarded himself as old) had brought him back to the delights of early years. From Edward Lloyd of the Ashmolean he obtained supplies of the living animals, and stocked his Westminster garden with them for observation and dissection. Among them was our Cyclostoma elegans, wherein among other things he had discovered that the sexes were separate, and later at Epsom (about 1695) he again found these ‘Turbens’ in chalky thickets and, with great delight no doubt, saw them pairing. In 1698 he went to Paris as physician to King William Ill’s Ambassador ; but he declared that he took more pleasure in the Physic Garden than in the Court, and was more apt to learn the names of many plants than of a few princes. By his suggestion that he would gladly have exchanged the finest Alley at Versailles for Languedoc’s meanest hedge and warm sun, he recalls the troubles of health that had attended him most of his life. His well-known ‘Journey to Paris’ (though dated 1699) was published before the end of the year. In the ‘ Historia sive Synopsis ’ the English shells were distinguished by the letter A; but Lincolnshire was nowhere mentioned. However, there remain for notice : (i) ‘ An Ingenious proposal for a new sort of Maps of Countrys, together with Tables of Sands and Clays, such chiefly as are found in the North parts of England, by the Learned Martin Lister, m.d.’ (Phil. Trans., 1684, p. 739). Lister’s suggested Maps have already been mentioned. As for sand [or sand-rock] he thought that it was once the most exterior and general cover of the whole earth [the millstone- grit of his northern mountains, no doubt], and that the naked¬ ness of the Wolds of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, &c., was from their finer sands having readily yielded to the rains and winds.
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