Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
littered with typographical errors. These were corrected in a posthu-
mously published edition in 1760.
Lhwyd's specimens did not fare well after his death. His favour-
ite pupil David Parry, companion on many of his travels, and successor
as Keeper at the Ashmolean, was neglectful of his duties and took
to drinking, and the materials got lost or documentation became
detached, rendering identification difficult. By 1945 it was stated
that only two of the original suite of fossils could be recognised.
Today, largely thanks to the diligent work of the late John Edmunds
of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, many more
specimens can now be identified with certainty in their collections
as having been catalogued in the Lithophylacii.
Once he had largely completed his catalogue, Lhwyd realised
that he had more freedom, and the possibility of increasing his annual
earnings; at no time did they go over £50 a year, and he complained
that at times he had to seek assistance from his 'unkle'. He was
approached by Dr Edmund Gibson who was revising Camden's
Britannia, a sort of early gazeteer and topographical dictionary, and
Lhwyd offered to cover three counties in Wales. With this commission
he began in 1693 a long series of travels in Britain, Ireland and
Brittany. He collected a great deal of information for Camden's and
then decided to produce a multi-volume work on Wales, which would
be written along the lines of Plot's Oxfordshire natural history. For this
he gained sponsorship which funded the work - but it was tough. As he
became more interested in antiquities, he developed a fascination for
native languages and apparently coined the term 'Celtic'. He travelled
in Scotland in 1699, Ireland and Cornwall in 1700, and Brittany in 1701
collecting manuscripts (many of which eventually found their way into
Trinity College Dublin, where they are housed alongside James
Ussher's library). In Ireland he collected and noted the presence of
many rare plants and examined ogham stones in County Kerry - odd
upright stones that carried an alphabet consisting of notches and lines
carved into their corners - and generally gathered information. Some of
this found its way into his Archaeologia Britannica which was
