Martin Lister’s English Spiders 1678
. Translated by Malcolm Davies & Basil Harley. Edited by John Parker & Basil Harley. Colchester, Harley Books, 1992. Pp. xv + 208, £49.95. ISBN 0-946589-27-5 Martin Lister (1638/9-1712) was one of the outstanding zoologists of the later seventeenth century. Cambridge-educated, amply-propertied, well connected - a great-uncle had been Physician in Ordinary to King Charles I and his niece was Sarah Jennings, the wife of Marlborough - he practised medicine for some years in his native Yorkshire before moving to London in 1683. Long keenly interested in natural history and already an F. R. S. of twelve years’ standing, he thereupon became active in the Society’s affairs and was elected Vice-President in 1685. Three years later the Society did him the honour of publishing the first of what were to be his four books, the Historiae Animalium Angliae. This was divided into three parts, devoted respectively to land and freshwater mollusca, marine mollusca, and spiders (broadly conceived). The last of these, the Tractatus deAraneis, has never received its proper due, as a result of remaining till now untranslated into English (a German translation did appear, but even that was as long ago as 1778). Through the initiative of a leading present-day amateur arachnologist, John R. Parker, who has also provided an excellent introduction, this deficiency has at last been repaired. The resulting volume, produced to the fine standard we have come to expect of Harley Books, has received inputs from a scholarly team almost on the scale of that which went to work on the comparable 1972 translation of Thomas Johnson’s two seventeenth-century accounts of his botanical field trips out of London.
