William Swainson

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File:Zoological Illustrations Volume III Series 2 129.jpg
In this Zoological Illustrations lithograph Swainson depicted Urania sloanus, a now extinct species.

William Swainson FLS, FRS (8 October 1789 – 6 December 1855), was an English ornithologist, malacologist, conchologist, entomologist and artist.

Life

Swainson was born in Dover Place, St Mary Newington, London, the eldest son of John Timothy Swainson, an original fellow of the Linnean Society.<ref name="one">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was a cousin of the amateur botanist Isaac Swainson.<ref name="cousin">Etymologisches Worterbuch der botanischen Pflanzennamen by H. Genaust. Review by Paul A. Fryxell Taxon, Vol. 38(2), 245–246 (1989). {{#invoke:CS1 identifiers|main|_template=doi}}</ref> His father's family originated in Lancashire, and both his grandfather and father held high posts in Her Majesty's Customs, his father becoming Collector at Liverpool.

William, whose formal education was curtailed because of an impediment in his speech, joined the Liverpool Customs as a junior clerk at the age of 14.<ref name="Diaries">"William Swainson F.R.S, F.L.S., Naturalist and Artist: Diaries 1808–1838: Sicily, Malta, Greece, Italy and Brazil." G .M. Swainson, Palmerston, NZ 1989.</ref> He joined the Army Commissariat and toured Malta and Sicily.<ref name="Diaries" /><ref name="NZencyclo">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He studied the ichthyology of western Sicily and in 1815 was forced by ill health to return to England where he subsequently retired on half-pay. William followed in his father's footsteps to become a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1815.<ref name="Diaries" />

In 1806 he accompanied the English explorer Henry Koster to Brazil. Koster had lived in Brazil for some years and had become famous for his book Travels in Brazil (1816).<ref name="Brazil">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> There he met Dr. Grigori Ivanovitch Langsdorff, also an explorer of Brazil and a Russian Consul General. They did not spend a long time on shore because of a revolution, but Swainson returned to England in 1818 in his words "a bee loaded with honey", with a collection of over 20,000 insects, 1,200 species of plants, drawings of 120 species of fish, and about 760 bird skins.

As with many Victorian scientists, Swainson was also a member of many learned societies, including the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society after his return from Brazil on 14 December 1820,<ref name="Diaries" /><ref name="FRS">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and married his first wife Mary Parkes in 1823,<ref name="NZencyclo" /> with whom he had four sons (William John, George Frederick, Henry Gabriel, and Edwin Newcombe) and a daughter (Mary Frederica). His wife Mary died in 1835.

Swainson remarried in 1840 to Ann Grasby, and emigrated to New Zealand in 1841. Their daughter, Edith Stanway Swainson, married Arthur Halcombe in 1863.<ref name="DNZB Halcombe">Template:DNZB</ref> Swainson was involved in property management and natural history-related publications from 1841 to 1855, and forestry-related investigations in Tasmania, New South Wales, and Victoria from 1851 to 1853. Swainson died at Fern Grove, Lower Hutt, New Zealand, on 6 December 1855.

Works on natural history

File:Swainson king parakeet.jpg
Image of a colour lithograph of a Moluccan king parrot produced by Swainson in the first volume of Zoological Illustrations

Swainson was at times quite critical of the works of others and, later in life, others in turn became quite critical of him.

Apart from the common and scientific names of many species, it is for the quality of his illustrations that he is best remembered. His friend William Elford Leach, head of zoology at the British Museum, encouraged him to experiment with lithography for his book Zoological Illustrations (1820–1823). Swainson became the first illustrator and naturalist to use lithography, which was a relatively cheap means of reproduction and did not require an engraver. He began publishing many illustrated works, mostly serially. Subscribers received and paid for fascicles, small sections of the books, as they came out, so that the cash flow was constant and could be reinvested in the preparation of subsequent parts. As book orders arrived, the monochrome lithographs were hand-coloured, according to colour reference images, known as ‘pattern plates’, which were produced by Swainson himself. It was his early adoption of this new technology and his natural skill in illustration that in large part led to his fame.<ref name="DMK">William Swainson: Naturalist, author and illustrator by David M Knight. Archives of Natural History (1986) 13:275–290</ref>

When Leach was forced to resign from the British Museum due to ill health, Swainson applied to replace him, but the post was given to John George Children. Swainson continued with his writing, the most influential of which was the second volume of Fauna Boreali-Americana (1831), which he wrote with John Richardson. This series (1829–1837) was the first illustrated zoological study to be funded in part by the British government.<ref name="rivals">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He also produced a second series of Zoological Illustrations (1832–1833), three volumes of William Jardine's Naturalist's Library, and eleven volumes of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia; he had signed a contract with London publisher Longman to produce fourteen illustrated volumes of 300 pages in this series, one to be produced quarterly.<ref name="DMK" />

Classification

In 1819, William Sharp Macleay published his ideas of the Quinarian system of biological classification, and Swainson soon became a noted and outspoken proponent.<ref name="reps">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The Quinarian system later fell out of favour, giving way to the rising popularity of the geographical theory of Hugh Edwin Strickland.<ref name="reps" /> Swainson was overworked by Dionysius Lardner, the publisher of the Cabinet Cyclopaedia,<ref name="high church">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and both Swainson and Macleay were derided for their support of the Quinarian system. Both proponents left Britain; Swainson emigrated to New Zealand and Macleay to Australia.<ref name="web1">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web

}}</ref> An American visiting Australasia in the 1850s heard to his surprise that both Macleay and Swainson were living there, and imagined that they had been exiled to the Antipodes

'for the great crime of burdening zoology with a false though much laboured theory which has thrown so much confusion into the subject of its classification and philosophical study'.<ref name="what">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web

}}</ref><ref name="class">D. Knight (1986) Ordering the World: A History of Classifying Man. Burnett Books. London.</ref>

New Zealand estate

In 1839, Swainson became a member of the committee of the New Zealand Company and of the Church of England committee for the appointment of a bishop to New Zealand, bought land in Wellington, and gave up scientific literary work.<ref name="NZencyclo" /> He married his second wife, Anne Grasby, in 1840.<ref name = "biozoo">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was apparently the first Fellow of the Royal Society to move to New Zealand.<ref name="corr">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was later made an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Tasmania.<ref name="Barker">R.M. Barker & W.R. Barker (1990), 'Botanical Contributions Overlooked...' in 'History of Systematic Botany in Australasia' ed: P.S. Short, ASBS</ref><ref name="anbg">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Together with most of his children from his first marriage, they sailed for New Zealand in the Jane,<ref name="myers">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> reaching Wellington in the summer of 1841. The trip was not without incident, as the boat suffered damage en route and was in such a poor state that there was legal action on arrival.<ref name="Jane">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Jane2">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Swainson purchased Template:Convert in the Hutt Valley from the New Zealand Company, and established his estate of "Hawkshead".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Not coincidentally, this name was shared by an ancestral home of the Swainson family in Hawkshead, Lancashire, which was the birthplace of Isaac Swainson. After a few months, the New Zealand estate was claimed by a Māori chief, Taringakuri, which led to years of uncertainty and threat. He was an officer in a militia against the Māoris in 1846. During these times he was largely dependent on his half-pay.

Botanical studies in Australia

In 1851, Swainson sailed to Sydney and took the post of Botanical Surveyor with the Victoria Government in 1852, after being invited by Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe to study local trees. He finished his report in 1853 in which he claimed a grand total of 1,520 species and varieties of Eucalyptidae. He identified so many species of Casuarina that he ran out of names for them.

While having quite some expertise in zoology, his untrained foray into botany was not well received. William Jackson Hooker wrote to Ferdinand von Mueller:

In my life I think I never read such a series of trash and nonsense. There is a man who left this country with the character of a first rate naturalist (though with many eccentricities) and of a very first-rate Natural History artist and he goes to Australia and takes up the subject of Botany, of which he is as ignorant as a goose.<ref name="Barker" /><ref name="anbg" />

Joseph Maiden described Swainson's efforts as "an exhibition of reckless species-making that, as far as I know stands unparalleled in the annals of botanical literature."<ref name="Barker" /><ref name="anbg" />

He had studied the flora of New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania before his return to New Zealand in 1854 to live at Fern Grove in the Hutt, where he died the following year.<ref name="NZencyclo" />

In 1856, a poem was written by the New Zealand poet William Golder in his memory.<ref name="poet">Stanzas To the Memory of Wm. Swainson, Esq., F.R.S. &c., Departed hence, 7 December 1855. William Golder: The New Zealand Survey (Wellington: J. Stoddard and Co. 1867), pp. 137–43 Template:Webarchive</ref> His standard botanical abbreviation is Swainson.<ref name=ipni>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Common confusions

William Swainson is frequently credited with having the plant genus Swainsona named after him, and specifically Sturt's desert pea, the official floral emblem of South Australia. Although he did botanical work in this region, Swainsona is named for his cousin Isaac Swainson (1746–1812), who never travelled to this region.

Common names of species

Many birds retain a common name after Swainson, several of which were named by famous naturalists of the period. Many species or subspecies retain his name, although many of his own species were later discredited or merged with others.

Taxon described by him

Partial bibliography

Many of these works were reprinted, or present in serial publication. Template:Div col

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References

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Further reading

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  • A very complete set of references of Swainson's life, and his work in malacology and conchology is maintained by The American Malacological Society under their review : 2,400 Years of Malacology (3rd edition)
  • Calhoun, J. (2007). John Abbot's butterfly drawings for William Swainson, including general comments about Abbot's artistic methods and written observations. Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society. 61:1–20.
  • Natusch, S. & G. Swainson. (1987). William Swainson, F.R.S., F.L.S. &c: anatomy of a nineteenth-century naturalist. S. Natusch, Wellington, New Zealand. 184pp.

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