Brynley F. Roberts's Edward Lhwyd exemplifies what a career-long fascination with an historical subject can accomplish. Roberts, emeritus professor of Welsh at Swansea University and former Librarian of the National Library of Wales, delivers a satisfying new biography of the Welsh polymath Edward Lhwyd (c.1660–1709). Richard Ellis, R. T. Gunther, J.L. Campbell, and Frank Emory pioneered the study of Lhwyd's scientific work, antiquarian investigations, and researches in comparative linguistics. Roberts's command of the existing scholarship and unrivalled familiarity with the archives yields a study that is fresh, comprehensive, and constantly insightful. He identifies Lhwyd as a naturalist, antiquary, and philologist, but establishing the logical evolution and essential connectedness of these and complementary pursuits is one of Roberts's analytical strengths.
Lhwyd was the illegitimate son of Bridget Pryse and Edward Lloyd, a father much happier to criticize his son's “arrogance” than embrace paternity. Ironically, Lhwyd profited from his father's connections to naturalists like the botanist Edward Morgan and being sent to Oswestry School. The Lloyds never recovered from Parliament's sequestration of their Llandforda estate in the 1640s. Lhwyd was skint throughout his time at Jesus College, Oxford, but he pushed open lucrative doors by exploiting his talent for fieldwork, collecting, and precise physical description. Laboring to turn Elias Ashmole's huge benefaction into something other than a monument to personal vanity, Robert Plot, the first Keeper, hired Lhwyd to classify and catalogue the collections c.1683–4. An irksome apprenticeship, perhaps, but Lhwyd laid the foundations for his career as he mastered an unrivalled natural history collection. He joined vital networks of scholars and collectors encompassing the Royal Society, Martin Lister, John Ray, Tancred Robinson, and the Molyneux brothers in Dublin. Lhwyd thus made a name for himself and rose to the Keepership upon Plot's retirement in 1690—despite all too characteristically assuming that Plot was working against him. The position gave Lhwyd remarkable freedom, even with its predictable administrative irritations (paperwork, courting idiosyncratic benefactors, and weak assistants).
Roberts charts the accretion and evolution of Lhwyd's mature interests—botany, fossils, antiquarianism, ethno-cultural studies, linguistics, and etymology—via successive literary projects. The Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia (1699) aimed to do for fossils what had been done for botanical specimens: create a comprehensive, illustrated, and accessible record of Britain's fossil remains. Lhwyd became embroiled in angry debates over fossil origins: were they abiotic (capable of self-generation) or organic (petrified remains of extinct creatures and plants)? Lhwyd's deep empiricism led toward an organic explanation. He only just held off savaging his nemesis John Woodward over an explanation that involved God's temporary suspension of gravity during the Great Flood, the dissolution of matter into slurry, and its coalescence into fossils upon gravity's resumption. Unsurprisingly, Lhwyd never suffered fools and could be, in Roberts's words, “a good hater” (PAGE). The costly and technical Ichnographia proved more popular than expected. Its limited print run of one hundred copies inspired a pirated edition out of Leipzig to satisfy European demand.
As Lhwyd's literary ambitions grew, so did the need to craft ever larger teams of local researchers, activate scholarly networks, and organize funding. Lhwyd made exemplary contributions to Edmund Gibson's new, revised edition (1695) of William Camden's century-old Britannia. Lhwyd's Welsh travels and pioneering use of parochial questionnaires explain part of his achievement. But it was his team of eager Welsh antiquarians whose investigations made theirs the finest additions to Camden's original—as contemporary readers acknowledged. Here Roberts recreates the fascinating work of Lhwyd's collaborators, like William Rowlands, who supplied Lhwyd with a Latin account of Snowdonia along with church inscriptions, details of snake stones, and samples of Alpine flora. Short-tempered he could be, but Lhwyd had a genuine talent for recruiting and retaining collaborators who fed off his energy and ambition.
One's admiration for Lhwyd's formidable intellect and industry rises right along with Roberts's splendid history of what became the Archæologia Britannica. This monumental project consumed Lhwyd until his death of pleurisy in 1709. Originally conceived as a natural and antiquarian history of Wales, Lhwyd's growing fascination with Britain's ethno-cultural complexity drove him to the most significant ethno-linguistic investigation of Celtic languages hitherto undertaken. He completed intense journeys through Wales, Ireland, western Scotland, Cornwall, and Brittany over four years (1697–1701). He tracked the migrations of peoples across these regions and the linguistic and cultural exchanges that shaped their respective languages. Roberts's reconstruction of these journeys is a masterclass in stitching together disparate archival fragments to substantiate and illustrate Lhwyd's multifaceted interests with ground-level immediacy. For example, we witness Lhwyd comb Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall for authentic speakers or bards, scramble to preserve Gaelic manuscripts, transit the Giant's Causeway and identify its basalt columns with the like atop Cader Idris, compose the first “modern” description of New Grange, and everywhere indulge his curiosity for customs and manners. Sadly, Lhwyd lived only long enough to publish the first volume of the Archæologia, the Glossography (1707). It contained Breton, Cornish, and Irish grammars, packed with innovative etymological analysis. It gave analytical order to the linguistic relationships and parallels Lhwyd's investigations uncovered. Roberts neatly tracks the afterlives of the unfinished project but leaves us in no doubt that the dispersal of Lhwyd's collections and papers robbed posterity of much.
Lhwyd resolutely committed his life to “careful observation, preferably in person or by a reliable witness; meticulous description; systemic organisation of evidence; separation where possible of description and explanation”; and rejection of supernatural, non-empirical causation (5). The uncommon industry of Lhwyd and so many partners in pursuing this ideal—beset by obstacles, dead-ends, angry disputations, and perplexing discoveries—offers a timely lesson in the long, difficult, and fragile history of establishing evidence-based realities. Roberts's learned and readable account belongs everywhere from undergraduate history of science courses to methods seminars and the desks of specialists. In Roberts's hands, Edward Lhwyd is simply too important and interesting a figure to ignore.
