SWAINSON, WILLIAM

(b. Newington Butts, London, England, 8 October 1789: d. Wellington, New Zealand, 7 December 1855)

Zoology.

William Swainson was the eldest surviving son of John Timothy Swainson II, collector of customs at Liverpool and lord of the manor of Hoylake, Cheshire, and his second wife, Frances Stanway.

At the age of fourteen Swainson entered the service of H.M. Customs and Excise but was handicapped by a serious impediment in his speech. His father therefore obtained for him a post in the army commissariat, and in 1807 Swainson was posted first to Malta and then to Sicily. While in Sicily he made extensive collections of botanical and zoological specimens, especially fishes, and became friendly with the eccentric Constantine S. Schmaltz Rafinesque. Swainson visited Greece and Italy, where he was also stationed for a while. In 1815 he retired on half–pay.

Swainson next visited Brazil with Henry Koster, spending part of the years 1817 and 1818 there. Upon his return to England in 1818 Swainson published a brief note on his travels but, disappointed by lack of encouragement, he did not prepare a full account. When his Brazilian material, after long delays, was distributed to specialists for their use, others had forestalled him in describing the new species he had found and his pioneer work was not recognized.

In 1823 Swainson married Mary Parkes of Warwick and thereafter engaged in scientific writing for a living, producing many books and papers during the next seventeen years. He wrote on vertebrates, mollusks, and insects, and he contributed sections on farm and garden pests to Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Agriculture and Encyclopaedia of Gardening, illustrating all his own work. Unfortunately, Swainson undertook far too much, because of financial pressures, and at times fell seriously behind schedule. Overwork, his wife’s death in 1835, and financial losses, as well as a second unsuccessful attempt to obtain a post in the British Museum, caused his decision to emigrate to New Zealand in 1840, and to abandon his scientific writings.

He did, however, publish a few small papers after his emigration, and in 1851–1853 he reported on the timber trees of Victoria, New South Wales, and Tasmania.

William Swainson was a good zoologist, but his unfortunate adherence to the “quinary system” has distorted some of his work. The quinary or circular system, first suggested by William Sharpe Macleay, and eagerly adopted by Swainson, professed that the relationships within any zoological group could be expressed by a series of interlocking circles, and that the “primary circular divisions of any group were three actually, or five apparently.” This extraordinary theory was pertinaciously held by Swainson throughout his zoological career and it certainly impaired much of his work. A. Newtton and H. Gadow (A Dictionary of Bird [1896], p. 35) stated the matter fairly when they wrote that Swainson’s indefatigable pursuit of natural history and conscientious labor on its behalf deserve to be remembered as a set–off against the injury he unwittingly caused by his adherence to the absurd quinary system.

Swainson’s artistic achievements were of high merit, and he was a pioneer in the use of lithography. His botanical work is unimportant: his claim to remembrance rests upon his zoological work and upon his fine zoological illustrations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Only separate works are listed here since Swainson’s scientific papers are listed in the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers. They are instructions for Collecting and Preserving Subjects of Natural History and Botany (Liverpool, 1808); Zoological Illustrations, 3 vols. (London, 1820–1823); 2nd. ser. 3 vols. (London, 1829–1833); Exotic Conchology (London, 1821–1822), 2nd ed., S. Hanley, ed. (London, 1841), facs. (with additions), R. T. Abbott, ed. (Princeton, 1968); The Naturalist’s Guide, 2nd, ed. (London, 1822); A Catalogue of the Rare and Valuable Shells of the Late Mrs. Bligh. With an Appendix Containing Scientific Descriptions of many New Species and Two Plates (London, 1822); Fauna Boreali–Americana; or the Zoology of the northern parts of British America,pt. 2. The Birds (London, 1831), written with John Richardson; and the following volumes of Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (London); A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History (1834); Treatise on the Geography and Classification of Animals (1835); Natural History and Classification of Quadrupeds (1835); Animals in Menageries (1837); Natural History and Classification of Birds, 2 vols. (1836–1837); Natural History of Fishes, Amphibians and Reptiles, 2 vols. (1838–1839); Habits and Instincts of Animals (1839); Taxidermy, with the Biography of Zoologists (1840); A Treatise on Malacology (1840); On the History and Natural Arrangement of Insects (1840), written with W. E. Shuckard. He also wrote Elements of Modern Conchology (London, 1835); Birds of Western Africa, 2 vols. (Edinburg, 1837); and Flycatchers (Edinburgh, 1838) for the Naturalist’s Library.

Other works to which Swainson contributed include J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Gardening, new ed. (London, 1834); J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Agriculture, 4th ed. (London, 1839); and Hugh Murray, An Encyclopaedia of Geography (London, 1834).

II. Secondary Literature. No full-scale biography of Swainson has yet been published. Biographical notices in various biographical dictionaries are mostly inaccurate. See obituaries in Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London (1855–1856), xlix, and in Gentleman’s Magazine (1856),532; and Iris M. Winchester, “William Swainson, F. R. S., 1789–1855 and Henry Gabriel Swainson, 1830–1892,” in Turnbull Library Record. n.s., 1 (1967), 6–19.

Nora F. McMillan