Here we find again the enduring theory that some birds were descended from floating planks of wood, i.e. from the attached shellfish – something already encountered in the work of Cambrensis.

In the early 1680s, when O’Flaherty was writing his text, Ireland was in a scientific and intellectual torpor. Social and financial power were rooted in London with few benefits spreading westwards. A notable exception, from the first part of the century was the scholar James Ussher (1581–1656), who became Bishop of Meath in 1621 and four years later Archbishop of Armagh. His main contribution to natural history was to provide some scope for the belief in evolutionary theory rather than a catastrophic vision of the creation of the world. After careful study of the Old Testament he concluded that the world had begun ‘upon the entrance of the night preceding Sunday 23 October’ in the year 4004 BC.³⁴ His chronology was incorporated into one of the Authorised Versions of the Bible in 1701 and henceforth was known as ‘The Received Chronology’ or ‘Bible Chronology’.³⁵ That the world had existed for some 6,000 years posed many problems for those that believed in cataclysms. Apart from the sparkle of Usher and a few others there was little happening in the field of science in Ireland at that time. Indeed, K. Theodore Hoppen concluded that ‘the scientific scene in pre-restoration Ireland was one in which inertia, rather than movement, was quite clearly the dominant factor’.³⁶

By the turn of the eighteenth century the trend set by Gerard Boate of recording Irish natural history more by direct observation than by hearsay was well established. Edward Lhwyd (1670–1709), the eminent Welsh natural historian and Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, visited Ireland briefly in 1699 in search of antiquities and natural history. He toured places which many present-day naturalists would put high on their visiting list: the mountains of Sligo, Mayo, Galway and Kerry; the Aran Islands, Co. Galway; the Burren, Co. Clare, and Co. Antrim. He recorded several new plants and reported his visit in a letter dated 25 August 1700 to his friend Tancred Robinson, Fellow of the Royal Society. It was printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society somewhat late in 1712.³⁷

But the claim for writing the first original book on botany published in Ireland – Methodus plantarum, in horto medico collegii Dubinensis, jam jam disponendarum; In dua partes divisa; quarum prima de plantis, altera de fruiticibus & arboribus agit – must go to the first Professor of Botany at Trinity College Dublin, Henry Nicholson (c.l681–c.l721). Published in 1712, it is a catalogue of plants growing in the Physic Garden at Trinity; hardly a natural history treatise, but a step in the right direction.

Two years later appeared a remarkable work written by the naturalist-gamekeeper Arthur Stringer (c.l664–c.l728), who was employed by the Conway family on their estate east of Lough Neagh. The Experienc’d Huntsman was the first reliable text on the wild mammals of either Ireland or Britain. Strangely, it remained ‘undiscovered’ until James Fairley, whose attention had been brought to it by C. Douglas Deane (1914–92), Deputy Director of the Ulster Museum 1957–77 and ornithologist, encouraged its republication in 1977.³⁸ Stringer had a genuine naturalist’s eye for the behaviour and habits of the wild mammals of his concern – deer, hares, foxes, badgers, martens and otters. All his observations ring true today despite his somewhat florid descriptions such as the entry for the badger, which he observed ‘is a very melancholy fat Creature, Sleeps incessantly, and naturally (when in Season) very Lecherous’.

Caleb Threlkeld: Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum 1726

The appearance in 1726 of Caleb Threlkeld’s Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum, the earliest Irish flora, represented a turning point in the history of natural history in Ireland.³⁹ Threlkeld (1676–1728), an English Dissenting minister and physician, settled in Dublin in 1713, and compiled his flora from several sources, which he tapped to some varying and unclear degree. He probably used the Heaton manuscript mentioned earlier, but he also harnessed records from other naturalists such as William Sherard, founder of the Chair of Botany at Oxford University, who was based in Co. Down for four years. Sherard’s plant records were published in the second edition of John Ray’s Synopsis Methodica stirpium Britannicarum (1696),⁴⁰ and then extracted by Threlkeld for his own work. Other information was gathered from William How’s work mentioned above, and finally Threlkeld used his own observations. Opinions differ as to the extent of Threlkeld’s personal input. Was he ‘A candid Author and plain Dealer’ as suggested by Nathaniel Colgan, author of the Flora of County Dublin,⁴¹ or just the opposite, i.e. a plagiariser, as suggested by Mitchell?⁴² Nelson contends that the bulk of the information in the book was generated by Threlkeld.⁴³ The recent discovery of 22 sheets holding plant specimens in the Herbarium in Trinity College, Dublin, and very likely to have been the minister’s own collection from his Hortus Siccus, would support the latter’s hypothesis.⁴⁴ The author’s preface in the Synopsis is clear about his own field work:

Caleb Threlkeld’s Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum (1726), the earliest Irish flora.

‘During the Summer Months I used to perambulate in Company of ingenious Men, both of the Clergy and Laity, to have ocular Demonstration of the Plants themselves in their native Soil, where Nature regaled our Senses with her Gaiety and Garnishes, which makes some resemblance of the paradisiacal State. From twelve Years Observations I collected Specimens for an Hortus Siccus, and set down Places where they grew, besides I made Inquiries of Ingenious Men, and now I have reduced our Plants into the Model you here see.’

An Irish Herbal

Following the appearance in 1525 of Bancks’ Herbal,⁴⁵ the first printed herbal in English, named after the printer Richard Bancks, there was a succession of other herbals acting as vehicles for botanical information. But the herbalist’s era came to an end in 1735 when Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, the book that ushered in modern botany.⁴⁶ The very same year, Ireland’s first herbal Botanalogia Universalis Hibernica by John K’Eogh (1681?–1754) was published in the city of Cork.⁴⁷ Probably born in Co. Roscommon, K’Eogh was appointed Chaplain to James King, fourth Lord Kingston, and later obtained the living of Mitchelstown, Co. Cork. K’Eogh’s reason for writing the herbal was the daily viewing of his master’s gardens in which grew nearly 200 different species of herbs and trees. ‘I was not acquainted with any Garden, which could show so many, this was no small advantage, or Conveniency to forward this Undertaking.’ However, K’Eogh’s vision extended beyond the garden walls and comments on Irish localities and habitats of some of the listed plants are included in the herbal. A similar treatise followed in 1739 – Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica – on the medicinal properties of animals.⁴⁸ In his preface, K’Eogh stated ‘My principal intention in publishing these treatises on vegetables and animals, was to contrive to cure all the diseases, which the natives of kingdom are afflicted with, by simple, easy, and safe methods, prepared either by pulverisation, decoction, infusion, distillation, etc.’. The frequent eating of the brains of sparrows ‘excite venery and clear the sight’. Powered otter testicles drunk in a liquid ‘help to cure the Epilepsy’; the fat of a heron, mixed with oil of amber, ‘being dropt warm into the ears, cures deafness’. K’Eogh acknowledges his debit to Horace (65 BC–AD 8), Pliny (d. AD 79), Avicenna (980–1037) Albertus Magnus (c.1280) and others for the preparation of the listed prescriptions. Unfortunately no natural history information is included along with the animals listed in the Zoologia.

Keogh’s Botanalogia Universalis Hibernica (1735) – a late herbal.

County natural histories and botanical works

The year 1744 marked the formation of the Physico-Historical Society of Ireland, some 13 years after the founding of the Dublin Society (later Royal Dublin Society). The learned gentlemen of the PHSI decided to prepare a series of monographs on the ‘ancient and present state’ of the counties. These contained lists of plants and often animals, essays on agriculture and descriptions of minerals, woodlands, etc. They can be considered harbingers of the county natural histories that blossomed in the later half of the nineteenth century.

John Rutty’s (1697–1775) An Essay Towards a Natural History of the County Dublin, published in 1772, was the first real county natural history in Ireland and dealt extensively with the flora, fauna, geology, meteorology, agriculture, water, minerals, air and soils of Dublin as well as the mortality of Dubliners.⁴⁹ He ignored the Linnean system of binomial classification which was in the process of being widely adopted in England. Under international agreement the year 1758 was taken as the start date of this new nomenclature – first unveiled by Linnaeus in Species Plantarum in 1753 – whereby each species of plant or animal is described by two, sometimes three, Latin names. The Linnean system simplified matters. Thus Rutty’s long-winded scientific name for water mint – Mentha rotundifolia palustris seu aquatica major – would simply have been Mentha aquatica under the Linnean system. The binomial system meant that space was saved on paper at a time when printing costs were prohibitively high, and that names were easier to remember. Moreover, it provided a strong logical framework for all future advancement in the study of biology.

Soon after the adoption of the Linnean system some interesting early botanical investigations were undertaken by Patrick Browne (1720–90), from Woodstock, Co. Mayo, who attended Leyden University and became friendly with Linnaeus. He settled in Jamaica, practised as a medical doctor, and wrote The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica.⁵⁰ His important manuscript, Fasciculus Plantarum Hiberniae, containing records of his botanical findings during 1788, made principally in Mayo (although he also investigated Co. Galway), lay dormant for about two centuries in the cupboards of the Linnean Society, London, before being published in 1996 as The Flowers of Mayo together with a commentary and extensive notes by Nelson and illustrations by Walsh.⁵¹ Browne also published important catalogues of the birds and fishes of Ireland in the Gentleman’s and London Magazine in 1774.^52,53

Despite the advent of regional natural histories, Ireland still lagged behind in scientific matters. Progress was, of course, impeded by a lack of wealth, a poor institutional infrastructure, and often hazardous and difficult travel through the countryside. But towards the close of the century things were warming up in Dublin. One driving force behind the foundation of the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, in 1795 was Walter Wade (fl.1770?–1825) who, a year earlier, had published Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum Indigenarum in Comitatu Dublinensi Inventarum. Pars Prima – a flora of Co. Dublin, the first Irish flora to be arranged according to the Linnean classification.⁵⁴ Wade insisted on personally viewing each species before listing it. He also wrote several other texts including one on rare plants in Co. Galway, with a particular emphasis on Connemara, and he claimed to be the first serious visiting botanist there. His subsequent Plantae Rariores in Hibernia Inventae (1804) was a more ambitious cataloguing of flowering plants, including 55 new additions to his Dublin flora.⁵⁵ Interest was now spreading beyond flowering plants, a point highlighted by the appearance in 1804 of Dawson Turner’s (1775–1858) Muscologiae Hibernicae Spicilegium,⁵⁶ entirely devoted to the mosses of Ireland, all of which had either been seen by him growing in situ or had been sent to him by Irish correspondents including John Templeton from Cranmore, near Belfast, one of Ireland’s outstanding naturalists.

The now flourishing Royal Dublin Society was encouraging economic development of the country through agricultural improvement. Naturalists and scientists rose to the occasion. John White (d. before 1845), one of the gardeners to the Society, published An Essay on the Indigenous Grasses of Ireland in 1808.⁵⁷ Wade came forward with Sketch of Lectures on Meadow and Pasture Grasses,⁵⁸ which he delivered in Glasnevin at the beginning of the nineteenth century. William Richardson (1740–1820), rector of Moy and Clonfeacle, Co. Antrim, and a writer on geology and agriculture, engaged in a vigorous and eccentric campaign to promote creeping bent grass and brought out a Memoir on Fiorin Grass, published in 1808 as a Select Paper of the Belfast Literary Society. Another utilitarian natural history contribution was Wade’s most substantial book: Salices or an Essay towards a General History of Sallows, Willows & Osiers, their Uses and Best Methods of Propagating and Cultivating Them (1811).⁵⁹

The scientific study of botany came of age before that of zoology. Plants were not elusive; they stayed put and lent themselves to scrutiny, whereas animals were much more difficult to observe, so botanical discoveries were continuing at an even pace. Belfastman John Templeton, (1766–1825) who furthered the cause of Irish botany more than any other, and was described by Praeger as the most eminent naturalist that Ireland ever produced, completed his manuscript Catalogue of the Native Plants of Ireland in 1801 – now in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. Unfortunately, he failed to realise his ambition of producing an elaborate Hibernian Flora that would have drawn from his Catalogue and embodied new records together with colour illustrations. The remaining manuscript, including some fine watercolour drawings by Templeton himself, is little more than a skeleton with some volumes now missing. It resides in the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

Templeton was quite content to live in Northern Ireland, working diligently on both the flora and fauna, with little ambition to travel abroad despite a tempting offer from the British botanist Sir Joseph Banks to go to New Holland (Australia), ‘with a good salary and a large grant of land’.² Templeton published very little but maintained an active correspondence with many eminent British naturalists such as William Hooker, Dawson Turner, James Sowerby and Lewis Dillwyn (who also visited Ireland), many of whom published his records.

The first national flora was The Irish Flora Comprising the Phaenogramous Plants and Ferns, published anonymously in 1833.⁶⁰ Katherine Sophia Baily (1811–86), later Lady Kane and wife of Sir Robert Kane, was the reputed author at the tender age of 22. John White of the National Botanic Gardens is acknowledged in the preface as having supplied the localities for plants. Three years later James Townsend Mackay (1775?—1862), a Scot who had been appointed Curator of the Trinity College Botanic Garden at Ball’s Bridge in 1806, brought forth Flora Hibernica,⁶¹ a much more substantial and scholarly work which ambitiously encompassed both phanerogams (seed-bearing plants) and cryptogams (those that do not produce seeds) of the entire island in one work. The book was a joint effort, despite no acknowledgement on the title page – the other contributors are acknowledged later in the text – between William Henry Harvey (1811–66) who was responsible for the section on algae and Thomas Taylor (d.1848) who wrote the sections on mosses, liverworts and lichens while Mackay dealt with the flowering plants, ferns and stoneworts.

Turner’s Muscologiae Hibernicae (1804). Although originating from England the book is well grounded on Irish data.

One of the few specially illustrated title pages for Baily’s Irish Flora (1833).

The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, was based, in the words of social historian David Allen, ‘ostensibly on the model of a similar perambulatory body started nine years before in Germany’. Apart from providing the natural history world as a whole with a usual annual meeting ground and forum, the B.A. helped these studies in a more practical way by making grants-in-aid.⁶² The B.A. provided enormous stimulus to the development of regional and local natural histories by holding its regional meetings throughout Britain and Ireland. The 1843 Association meeting was held in Cork and to mark the event the Cuvierian Society of Cork published a small volume of ‘communications’ entitled Contributions Towards a Fauna and Flora of the County of Cork.⁶³ John D. Humphreys (fl. 1843) prepared the lists of molluscs, crustaceans and echinoderms; J.R. Harvey (fl. 1843) wrote on the vertebrates while Thomas Power (fl. 1845) was responsible for the section ‘The Botanist’s Guide for the County of Cork’ – one of the first local floras in Ireland.

Twenty years after the publication of the Cork regional flora came Flora Belfastiensis in 1863.⁶⁴ Its author, Ralph Tate (1840–1901), hoped that it might be of use to the botanical members of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club which had been founded as an enthusiastic response to his series of lectures delivered at the Belfast School of Science. Tate, born in Britain, was only resident in Belfast for three years after which he travelled widely, ending up as Professor of geology at Adelaide, Australia. Another similar product was the small, slim volume A Flora of Ulster,⁶⁵ published the following year by George Dickie (1812–82), and offered as a ‘Collectanea’ towards a more comprehensive flora of the North of Ireland. Dickie’s view of Ulster was definitely expansionist for he included parts of Connacht in the surveyed localities. Both Flora Belfastiensis and A Flora of Ulster consisted of a list of species accompanied with notes on their habitats and distribution.

A departure from the presentation of traditional floras came with the publication in 1866 of Cybele Hibernica⁶⁶ by David Moore (1807–79) and Alexander Goodman More (1830–95). When living in England, More had worked with H.C. Watson who devised, for Cybele Britannica (1847–59)⁶⁷ a scheme of 18 ‘provinces’ that were later split into 112 ‘vice-counties’, a first move towards the recording of plant distribution on a quantitative basis. This was the ancestor of the dot distribution maps showing the presence or absence of a species within a grid of 10 km squares, now the internationally accepted grid recording system.

The division of Ireland into 12 ‘districts’ (based mostly on county boundaries) and 37 ‘vice-counties’ was originally proposed by Charles Babington (1808–95), Professor of Botany at Cambridge, in a paper presented to the Dublin University Zoological and Botanical Association in 1859.⁶⁸ More, quick to see the advantages of such a scheme, adopted the 12 ‘districts’ for Ireland for his compilation of Cybele Hibernica. Plants now had a framework in which they could be recorded; their distribution could be compared region for region over time.

Such was the success of Cybele Hibernica that a supplement followed in 1872 and a second edition of the book in 1898.⁶⁹ In 1896, shortly before the second edition, Robert Lloyd Praeger (see here) proposed an even more fine-grained recording net of 40 ‘divisions’ or ‘vice-counties’ (each an average 813 km²) based on the 32 administrative counties that comprised all Ireland.⁷⁰ The new divisions were used in his monumental Irish Topographical Botany,⁷¹ published in 1900, the product of 35 years of active botanising, and have been adopted, subject to minor modifications, as the standard botanical recording units of Ireland. The distribution of plant records in the most recent 1987 Census Catalogue of the Flora of Ireland by Scannell & Synnott are referenced on Praeger’s 40 botanical ‘divisions’.⁷²

The Rev. Thomas Allin (d?1909) served in several parishes in Ireland – Cork, Galway and Carlow – but apparently ‘botanised’ only in Co. Cork, when he possibly had more available time, and where he gathered his records for the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the County Cork (1883).⁷³ He divided the county into two parts, shown on the book’s coloured frontispiece, which bore no correspondence to the system adopted in Cybele Hibernica. Allin was a careful recorder and listed 700 flowering plants and ferns together with notes on their distribution. In his preface he pays tribute to Isaac Carroll (1828–80), one of the best botanists in the county at the time. The extent of Carroll’s contribution to Allin’s flora is not known but it may have been substantial. The amount of information Allin published was a marked advance on Power’s earlier flora of Cork.

Botanical sub-divisions of Ireland based on vice -counties with the 100 km lines of the National Grid. The sub-zone letters are also given; each sub-zone is a particular 100 km square of the National Grid: B=14, C=24, D=34, F=03, G=13, H=23, J=33, L=02, M=12, N=22, 0=32, Q=01, R=11, S=21, T=31, V=00, W=10, X=20, Y=30. From Scannell & Synnott⁷².

From the bubbling crucible of Northern Ireland arose A Flora of the North-east of Ireland (1888)⁷⁴ by Samuel Alexander Stewart (1826–1910) and Thomas Corry (1860–83). Stewart, an errand boy at 11 and later a trunk maker, played the leading role in founding the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club in 1863. He was one of a select band of ‘working-men naturalists’ who transcended the social barriers and joined in with middle class hunters of flowers and plants. In 1891 he gave up trunk-making to become Curator of the museum of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. His colleague Corry was a brilliant and diligent botanist and a poet, who tragically drowned in Lough Gill, Co. Sligo, aged 23. Although the geographic scope of flora of northeast of Ireland is restricted to three counties (Down, Antrim and Derry) the book has been updated, revised and added to numerous times, the most recent edition being 1992.

One of the botanical ‘giants’ of Victorian Ireland was Henry Chichester Hart (1847–1908) who, according to Praeger, was ‘a man of magnificent physique, a daring climber and a tireless worker, and though his pace was usually too fast for exhaustive work, he missed little, and penetrated to places where very few have followed him’.² Although Hart did not know any Irish he gathered the names and folklore of plants from country people, the results of which remained in manuscript form until 1953 when they were published by M. Traynor as The English Dialect of Donegal.^75,76 Born in Dublin, where his father was Vice-Provost of Trinity College, Hart was of a Donegal landed gentry family and started work on Flora of the County Donegal (1898)⁷⁷ when aged 17, having been inspired by Cybele Hibernica. It was the beginning of a 35 year task which took him on innumerable walks and hikes during which he collected more than half the many hundreds of records that were to enter his book – a remarkable achievement. In 1887 he published a more modest volume on the Flora of Howth.⁷⁸ Like many before him, Hart was a naturalist of independent means working on a private basis and not affiliated to any state body.

Zoological natural history

Naturalists have historically focused more attention on Irish botany than on zoology, a fact reflected by the discrepancy between the two bodies of literature corresponding to the two areas. Animals are, however, catching up fast, as naturalists and scientists are spurred on by conservation requirements to discover more about endangered and threatened species. New resources for field studies together with advanced technologies are facilitating their task.

Some of the earliest and most original zoological investigations in Ireland were carried out by John Vaughan Thompson (1779–1847) who was born in Berwick-on-Tweed, England, and stationed at Cork in 1816 as Surgeon to the Forces, later Deputy Inspector-General of Hospitals, before going on to Australia in 1835. He was a specialist in planktonic larvae. It had been widely believed at the time that the fundamental difference between crustaceans and insects was that the crustaceans did not pass through different stages or forms in their development from egg to adult. Working almost alone, Thompson discovered that the edible crab did in fact undergo a metamorphosis and developed from a larval form called a zoea which had, until then, been classified as a species unrelated to the crab. Thompson was also responsible for the reclassification of acorn barnacles – the small symmetrical sessile barnacles exposed on rocks at low tide – from the Mollusca to the Crustacea, a major break with the accepted Cuvierian system of the classification of animals in force at the time. Cuvier and other contemporary zoologists believed, on the basis of external similarities, that barnacles were aberrant molluscs. Most of Thompson’s work was privately published in Cork in an obscure series of six memoirs bearing the – similarly obscure – title Zoological Researches, and Illustrations; or, Natural History of Nondescript or Imperfectly Known Animals in a Series of Memoirs, issued between 1828 and 1834.⁷⁹

Stages (a-c) in the development of the shore crab. The discovery of the zoea larva (a) by zoologist John Thompson showed that the crab went thorough metamorphosis in its development from egg to adult, sharing this feature with the insects and uniting both as belonging to the Phylum Arthropoda. From C.M. Yonge (1961). The New Naturalist: The Sea Shore. Collins, London.

West Mayo, and especially the Erris peninsula, was the ‘ultima Thule’ of Ireland where William Hamilton Maxwell (1792–1850) retreated in 1819 from holding the curacy at Clonallon, near Newry, Co. Down, after disgracing himself by riding through his parish naked on horseback following an early morning dip in Carlingford Lough. The wayward curate then became a canon of the Tuam diocese and was appointed to three parishes. He befriended the Marquis of Sligo who gave him the use of his shooting lodge at Ballycroy on the edge of Blacksod Bay where he appears to have spent more time shooting, fishing and writing than administering his parishes. The stories of his adventures and encounters with eagles, otters, seals, grouse and wild geese make Wild Sports of the West, with Legendary Tales and Local Sketches (1832) a vivid read.⁸⁰ It is an obligatory text, written along semi-fictional lines with many ‘ripping’ yarns which tell a lot about western Ireland, its wildlife and local lore during the early nineteenth century. His capability as a lively raconteur and his easy social manner gave him access to and accommodation with the British garrison in Castlebar, Co. Mayo, whenever he wanted it: ‘Maxwell introduced the officers to capital shooting, dined at their mess; and while draining their decanters drained their memories of those stirring recollections which he turned to account in Stories of Waterloo.’⁸¹ In between his fishing, hunting, drinking and socialising, Maxwell mustered enough energy to write 20 books. His ambition in Wild Sports was to ‘record the wild features and wilder associations of that romantic and untouched country’ – a goal he certainly honoured. Amongst his numerous observations, he recorded some of the last indigenous red deer of Mayo which were persecuted almost to extinction during his time with the aid of muskets abandoned by the French in 1798. He lost his ‘living’ of Balla in 1844 through absenteeism which, combined with a self-indulgent lifestyle and increasing debts, forced him into exile in Scotland where, as an alcoholic, he died of broken health aged 58.

In contrast to the wild Maxwell, naturalists in Northern Ireland were a more sedate and collected lot, reflecting a society steeped in Protestant ethics and moral sternness. However, Northern Ireland was about to experience a period of great excitement and ebullience: the golden age of natural history, dominated by the zoologist William Thompson, was just behind the door.

Born into one of the famous Belfast families of linen-makers, Thompson (1805–52) devoted his life to zoology, spurning the loom and the spinning jenny. Thompson’s magnum opus was The Natural History of Ireland.⁹ The first three volumes were on birds and were published in 1849, 1850 and 1851, before his untimely death in 1852, aged 47. He had intended to produce several more volumes to include all the remaining fauna, but only left a very incomplete manuscript. In accordance with Thompson’s will it fell upon Robert Patterson (1802–72), another eminent Belfast naturalist from a mill furnishing family, and James R. Garrett (1818–55), a Belfast solicitor and keen naturalist, to edit and publish this manuscript, which came out as a fourth variegated volume in 1856. Garrett was responsible for the mammals, fish and reptiles while Patterson handled all other groups. The production of the work must have been fated, for Garrett died before the book was printed. The information contained in the first three bird volumes is of such high standard – due to the accuracy of Thompson’s observations and those of a network of correspondents – that it is still interesting and valuable today.

One of the greatest tragedies of Irish natural history was the premature death of Belfast naturalist William Thompson aged 47.

While Thompson had been labouring away on his bird volumes he realised the need for a much smaller and inexpensive book for the general reader. The necessity was met by The Natural History of the Birds of Ireland (1853)⁸², written by his friend John Watters (fl. 1850s). A small, almost whimsical, Victorian production, laced with occasional romantic poems, it also contains hard facts on the habits, migrations and occurrences of the 261 listed species – a good antidote to Thompson’s weighty tomes.

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