Edward Lhuyd

Edward Lhuyd (1660 to 1709), also written Lhwyd, was a British scientist, geographer, historian and antiquary, born at Loppington in Shropshire into a family of the gentry of southwest Wales. He taught at Oswestry Grammar School and went up to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1682 but left before graduating. Appointed in 1684 to assist Robert Plot at the Ashmolean Museum, he became its second Keeper in 1690 and held the post until his death. He compiled a list of the flora of Snowdonia for John Ray's Synopsis in 1688, from 1697 visited every county in Wales and then travelled through Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man, and in 1699, with funding from his friend Isaac Newton, published the first catalogue of fossils, the Lithophylacii Britannici Ichnographia. He received an honorary MA from the University of Oxford in 1701 and a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1708.