Abstract Summary
The Lithophylacii Britannicii ichnographia [British figured stones] (1699) by Edward Lhwyd, the second keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was the first illustrated field guide to English fossils. This paper analyses the book’s physical creation—the collection of specimens, fieldwork sketches and their engravings—with an eye to understanding its use and reuse in eighteenth-century editions and collections that were in the transition to binomial taxonomy. Focusing on the Lithophylacii’s illustrations of fossils, this paper begins by examining how the specimens of crinoids, ichthyosaur teeth and vertebrae, sea urchin fossils, and ‘piped waxen veins’ or fossilized wood were collected in the field by Lhwyd and hired searchers. We then examine the role of these specimens in subsequent editions of the book, demonstrating to what extent the relationship between them influenced collectors like Sir Hans Sloane and Daniel Solander from ca. 1680 to 1760. Finally, we will demonstrate how Ashmolean Keeper William Huddesford repurposed the illustrations in Lhwyd’s book for his own eighteenth-century edition of the Lithophylacii (1760), incorporating new classificatory schemes. Our account provides insight into how a late seventeenth-century book of natural philosophy was used, revised, and repurposed by natural historians and collectors before and during the development of Linnaean taxonomy. We will concentrate upon the implications of migration of natural knowledge from one medium to another, from object to drawing to printed image, as well as its circulation and the establishing of credibility and taxonomic type characteristics in scientific (visual and textual) discourse and illustration.
