(b. Cardiganshire, Wales,1660; d. Oxford, England, 30 June 1709),

We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. Lhwyd (he used this spelling for his signature; but his name was also variously rendered Lhuyd, Llwyd, Lloyd, and Luidius) was the natural son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, near Oswestry, and of Bridget Pryse of Gogerddan, Cardiganshire. In 1682 he entered Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied for five years.

paleontology, botany, philology.

Lhwyd (he used this spelling for his signature; but his name was also variously rendered Lhuyd, Llwyd, Lloyd, and Luidius) was the natural son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, near Oswestry, and of Bridget Pryse of Gogerddan, Cardiganshire. In 1682 he entered Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied for five years. In order to increase his limited means, he soon became assistant to Robert Plot, professor of chemistry and first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. This museum, opened in 1683, was founded on the collections of John Tradescant father and son, augmented by the donor, Elias Ashmole. It was through his connection with the museum and with Plot, at that time secretary of the Royal Society, that Lhwyd was able to establish important scientific contacts.

During visits to north Wales, Lhwyd collected plants around the hill mass of Snowdon. He was the first to record, in Edmund Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia (1695), that the mountains of Britain have a distinctive alpine flora and fauna. Lhwyd compiled a list of plants from Snowdon, which was published by John Ray in his Synopsis methodica Stirpium Britannicarum (1690), and Ray referred to these records as “the greatest adornment” of his book.

Lhwyd also assisted Martin Lister with lists of Oxfordshire species of mollusks and fossils, and some of his specimens were used in Lister’s Historiae sive synopsis methodice Conchyliorum (1685-1692). By the time he succeeded Plot as keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in 1691, Lhwyd’s interest in formed stones (fossils) had superseded his botanical interests. In 1686 he put before the Oxford Philosophical Society a new catalog of the shells in the Ashmolean Museum; and during the next few years he continued to add to it, with a view to publication. The work eventually appeared in 1699 in a limited edition of only 120 copies. The cost was subscribed by some of his patrons and friends, including Isaac Newton, Hans Sloane, and Martin Lister. Written in Latin and entitled Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia, it consisted of a catalog of 1,766 localized items arranged systematically and was the first illustrated catalog of a public collection of fossils to be published in England.

As an appendix to his list Lhwyd printed six letters to friends, also in Latin, dealing with geological subjects. The most important of these was to John Ray on the problem of the origin of “marine bodies and mineral leaves.” Although Lhwyd’s theory was completely erroneous, his arguments illustrate the flexibility of thought which existed on this subject during the late seventeenth century. For Lhwyd, who had viewed the fossil content of the rocks in depth in the sea cliffs of south Wales and in limestone caves, there were obvious difficulties in accepting the generally held belief that all fossils had been laid down at the time of the universal deluge; and in his letter he set out several cogent arguments against the idea of a single inundation.

Lhwyd hoped that the considerable depth at which fossils are found could be explained by the hypothesis he put forward. He suggested a sequence in which mists and vapors over the sea were impregnated with the “seed” of marine animals. These were raised and carried for considerable distances before they descended over the land in rain and fog. The “invisible animalcula” then penetrated deep into the earth and there germinated; and in this way complete replicas of sea organisms, or sometimes only parts of individuals, were reproduced in stone. Lhwyd also suggested that fossil plants, known to him only as resembling leaves of ferns and mosses which have minute “seed,” were formed in the same manner. He claimed that this theory explained a number of features about fossils in a satisfactory manner—the presence in England of nautiluses and exotic shells which were no longer found in neighboring seas; the absence of birds and viviparous animals not found by Lhwyd as fossils; the varying and often quite large size of the forms, not usual in present oceans; and the variation in preservation from perfect replica to vague representation, which was thought to indicate degeneration with time.

It does not seem that Lhwyd made any further effort to defend or propound his theory, and he assured Ray in his original letter that “They who have no other aim than the search of Truth, are no ways concerned for the honour of their opinions: and for my part I have always been led thereunto by your example, so much the less an admirer of hypotheses, as I have been a lover of Natural History,”

Ray’s later letters to Lhwyd reiterated his own opinion that fossils were remains of once-living organisms and that the strata in which they are found were once sediments of land floods or sea inundations. He did, however, generously allow a degree of possibility of his friend’s theory; and certainly the republication of Lhwyd’s letter, in English, in the third (posthumous) edition of Ray’s Miscellaneous Discourses (1713) served to bring it to the notice of a much wider readership.

In 1695 Lhwyd contributed notes on the southern counties of Wales to Camden’s Britannia, and out of this there arose an invitation to undertake a work on the natural history of Wales. Eventually it was proposed to include all the Celtic countries and to cover natural history, geology, history, archaeology, and philology. In May 1697, Lhwyd began a great tour which took him through Wales, Ireland, part of Scotland, Cornwall, and across into Brittany. He collected or transcribed many Welsh and Gaelic manuscripts; and when he returned to Oxford in 1701, he intended to publish his researches in two volumes, the first on linguistic studies, the second on archaeology and natural history. The first volume of Archaeologia Britannica appeared in 1707 and contained the first comparative study of the Celtic languages and an Irish Gaelic dictionary. Thus, Lhwyd can be considered the founder of comparative Celtic philology, but owing to his early death the remaining branches of his researches were not published.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. In 1945 R. T. Gunther published Life and Letters of Edward Lhwyd as vol. XIV of his Early Science in Oxford series and included those letters preserved in the Martin Lister and John Aubrey collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in addition to others previously published. Correspondence addressed to Lhwyd is also in the Bodleian.

Lhwyd’s MS collections were originally very extensive; and at his death they were offered for purchase to the University of Oxford and to Jesus College, but the offers were not accepted. They were then sold to Sir Thomas Sebright of Beechwood, Hertfordshire. The Irish portion of the Celtic MSS was presented to Trinity College, Dublin, by Sir John Sebright in 1786. The remainder was sold at Sotheby’s, London, in 1807—see Gentleman’s Magazine 11 (1807), 419—but it is believed that most of these were destroyed shortly afterward in a fire at a bookbinder’s workshop.

Besides Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (London, 1699) and the first volume of Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford, 1707), Lhwyd made numerous contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

II. Secondary Literature. A memoir of Lhwyd was included in N. Owen’s British Remains (London, 1777). R. T. Gunther’s book, cited above, is a comprehensive work respecting Lhwyd’s correspondence and fossil collections. J. L. Campbell and D. Thomson, Edward Lhuyd in the Scottish Highlands (Oxford, 1963), is devoted to his Gaelic studies.

M. E. Jahn has written on the editions of Lhwyd’s catalogue, including the pirated Leipzig edition, in Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, 6, pt. 2 (1972), 86-97; other notes by Jahn on Lhwyd are in 4, pt. 5 (1966), 244-248, 6, pt, 1 (1971), 61-62.

J. M. Edmonds

Edward Lhuyd (pronounced [ˈɬʊid]; occasionally written Llwyd in line with Modern Welsh orthography, 1660 – 30 June 1709) was a Welshnaturalist, botanist, linguist, geographer and antiquary. He is also known by the Latinized form of his name: Eduardus Luidius.

Life[edit]

Ludius

Lhuyd was born in 1660, in Loppington, Shropshire, the illegitimate son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, Oswestry, and Bridget Pryse of Llansantffraid, near Talybont, Cardiganshire in 1660. He attended and later taught at Oswestry Grammar School. His family belonged to the gentry of south-west Wales. Though well-established, the family was not wealthy. His father experimented with agriculture and industry in a manner that impinged on the new science of the day. Lhuyd attended grammar school in Oswestry and went up to Jesus College, Oxford in 1682, but dropped out before graduation. In 1684, he was appointed to assist Robert Plot, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and replaced him as such in 1690, holding the post until his death in 1709.^[1]

While at the Ashmolean, he travelled extensively. A visit to Snowdonia in 1688 allowed him to compile for John Ray'sSynopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicorum a list of flora local to that region. After 1697, Lhuyd visited every county in Wales, then travelled to Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man. In 1699, funding from his friend Isaac Newton allowed him to publish Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia, a catalogue of fossils collected in England, mostly in Oxford, and now held in the Ashmolean.

In 1701, Lhuyd received a MAhonoris causa from the University of Oxford, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1708.^[1]

Lhuyd was responsible for the first scientific description and naming of what we would now recognize as a dinosaur: the sauropodtoothRutellum implicatum (Delair and Sarjeant, 2002).

Pioneering linguist[edit]

In the late 17th century, Lhuyd was contacted by a group of scholars led by John Keigwin of Mousehole, who sought to preserve and further the Cornish language. He accepted their invitation to travel there to study it. Early Modern Cornish was the subject of a paper published by Lhuyd in 1702; it differs from the medieval language in having a considerably simpler structure and grammar.

In 1707, having been assisted in his research by fellow Welsh scholar Moses Williams, he published the first volume of Archaeologia Britannica: an Account of the Languages, Histories and Customs of Great Britain, from Travels through Wales, Cornwall, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland. This has an important linguistic description of Cornish, noted all the more for its understanding of historical linguistics. Some of the ideas commonly attributed to linguists of the 19th century have their roots in this work by Lhuyd, who was 'considerably more sophisticated in his methods and perceptions than [Sir William] Jones'.^[2]

Luigiuso11 Youtube

Lhuyd noted the similarity between the two linguistic families: Brythonic or P–Celtic (Breton, Cornish and Welsh); and Goidelic or Q–Celtic (Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic). He argued that the Brythonic languages originated in Gaul (France), and the Goidelic languages in the Iberian Peninsula. He concluded that as the languages were of Celtic origin, the people who spoke them were Celts. From the 18th century, the peoples of Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales were known increasingly as Celts, and are seen to this day as modern Celtic nations.^[3][4]

Ludius

Death and legacy[edit]

During his travels, Lhuyd developed asthma, which eventually led to his death from pleurisy in Oxford in 1709.^[1]

The Snowdon lily (Gagea serotina) was for a time called Lloydia serotina after Lhuyd.^{[citation needed]}Cymdeithas Edward Llwyd, the National Naturalists' Society of Wales, is named after him. On 9 June 2001 a bronze bust of him was unveiled by Dafydd Wigley, former Plaid Cymru leader, outside the University of Wales's Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, next to the National Library of Wales. The sculptor was John Meirion Morris; the plinth, carved by Ieuan Rees, reads EDWARD/LHUYD/1660–1709/IEITHYDD/HYNAFIAETHYDD/NATURIAETHWR ('linguist, antiquary, naturalist').^[5]

Further reading[edit]

• Justin B. Delair and William A. S. Sarjeant, 'The earliest discoveries of dinosaurs: the records re-examined', Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 113, 2002, 185–197
• Frank Emery, Edward Lhuyd, 1971
• Dewi W. Evans and Brynley F. Roberts, eds, Archæologia Britannica: Texts and Translations, Celtic Studies Publications 10, 2007 Description
• R. T. Gunther, The Life and Letters of Edward Lhuyd, 1945
• Brynley F. Roberts, Edward Lhuyd, the Making of a Scientist, 1980
• Derek R. Williams, Prying into every hole and corner: Edward Lhuyd in Cornwall in 1700, 1993
• Derek R. Williams, Edward Lhuyd, 1660–1709: A Shropshire Welshman, 2009
• Never at rest, A biography of Isaac Newton by Richard S. WestfallISBN0521274354 581 pp.

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcThomas Jones. 'Lhuyd, Edward (1660–1709), botanist, geologist, antiquary and philologist'. Dictionary of Welsh Biography. National Library of Wales. Retrieved 1 March 2019.
2. ^Campbell, Lyle, and William J. Poser (2007). Language Classification. History and Method. Cambridge University Press. p. 29. ISBN978-0-521-88005-3.
3. ^Davies, John (1994). A History of Wales. London: Penguin. p. 54. ISBN0-14-014581-8.
4. ^'Who were the Celts? ... Rhagor'. Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales website. Amgueddfa Cymru– National Museum Wales. 4 May 2007. Archived from the original on 17 September 2009. Retrieved 14 October 2009.
5. ^'Edward Lhuyd Memorial', National Recording Project, Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, archived from the original on 13 May 2016, retrieved 30 June 2016

External links[edit]

• Archaeologia Britannica (1707). Downloadable pdf at The Internet Archive
• Biography of Edward Lhuyd from the Canolfan Edward Llwyd, a centre for the study of science through Welsh
• Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia (1699) – full digital facsimile from Linda Hall Library

Laudius Nl