Life
?1720-1790; b. Woodstock, Co. Mayo; sent to live with a relative in Antigua,
1737; returned in ill-health and studied physical science, esp. botany,
in Paris; moved to Leyden, MD, 1743; knew Gronovius and corr. with Linnaeus;
practised medicine in London for two years, afterwards returning to the
West Indies, proceeding to Jamaica; issued The Civil and Natural History
of Jamaica (1756; rep. Arno 1972), a folio with 49 engravings, a map
of Jamaica, and of the Port Royal harbour; second edn., 1769, without
plates (consumed in fire of 1765), but with four new Linnaean indexes;
‘Catalogue of Birds of Ireland, whether natives, casual visitors,
or birds of passage, taken from observation, classed and disposed according
to Linnaeus’, printed in Exshaw’s Londdon Magazine (1774);
left in manuscript a description of Soufriere, the lesser volcanic island
adjacent to Montserrat, entitled ‘Catalogue of the plants now growing
in the sugar islands’ [printed as A Catalogue of the Plants of
Jamaica and the Other English Sugar colonies]; also ‘Catalogue
of such Irish Plants as have been observed by the author, cheifly those
of the couties of Mayo and galway’; d. Rushbrook, Co. Mayo, 29 Aug.
1790; bur. Crossboynem, with a monument; notice in Walker’s Hibernain
Magazine, 1795, pt. II, pp.195-97. ODNB
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Works
‘A Brief Account of the Sulphur of Sulphurarium of Montserrat, West
Indies’, in MS collection of Dr. Richard Howards (Harvard Univ.);
cited in Marion Wheeler, Monserrat, West Indies: A Chronological History (Montserrat National Trust 1988), as copied by Brian McGinn [letter
of 3 March 1997].
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