Edward Lhuyd

Edward Lhuyd (sometimes rewritten as "Llwyd" in recent times) (1660–June 30, 1709) was a Welsh naturalist, botanist, linguist, geographer and antiquary.

Lhuyd was born in Loppington, Shropshire, the illegitimate son of Edward Lloyd of Llanforda, Oswestry and Bridget Pryse of Llan-ffraid, near Talybont, Ceredigion, and was a pupil and later a master at Oswestry Grammar School. His family belonged to the gentry of south-west Wales; though well-established, his family was not well-off, and his father experimented with agriculture and industry in a manner that brought him into contact with the new science of the day. He attended grammar school in Oswestry and went up to Jesus College, Oxford in 1682 but dropped out before his graduation. In 1684, he was appointed assistant to Robert Plot, the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and replaced him as Keeper in 1690; he held this post until 1709.

Whilst employed by the Ashmolean he travelled extensively. A visit to Snowdonia in 1688 allowed him to construct for John Ray's "Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicorum" a list of flora local to that region. After 1697, Lhuyd visited every county in Wales, and then travelled to Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, and Brittany and the Isle of Man. In 1699, with financial aid from his friend Isaac Newton, he published "Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia", a catalogue of fossils collected from places around England, mostly Oxford, and now held in the Ashmolean. 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 book is an important source for its linguistic description of the Cornish language.

In 1701, Lhuyd was made MA "honoris causa" by the University of Oxford, and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1708. Lhuyd died of pleurisy in Oxford in 1709.

The Snowdon lily "Lloydia serotina" bears his name, as does Cymdeithas Edward Llwyd, the National Naturalists' Society of Wales.

He is responsible for the first scientific description and naming of what we would now recognize as a dinosaur: the sauropod tooth "Rutellum implicatum" (Delair and Sarjeant, 2002).

References

*Justin B. Delair and William A.S. Sarjeant (2002). The earliest discoveries of dinosaurs: the records re-examined. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 113:185-197.
*Frank Emery, "Edward Lhuyd" (1971)
*R.T. Gunther, "The Life and Letters of Edward Lhuyd" (1945)
*Brynley F. Roberts, "Edward Lhuyd, the Making of a Scientist" (1980)

External links

* [http://www.aber.ac.uk/gwydd-cym/english/edwardllwyd-e.htm Biography of Edward Lhuyd] from the Canolfan Edward Llwyd, a centre for the study of science through Welsh.