Life
1655-1695; ed. TCD; member of Dublin Philosophical Society; author-editor
of A Natural History of Ireland (1726), by several members of the
Society (then defunct), and soon to be followed by the Dublin Society
for the Improving of Husbandry, manufacturing, &c. (RDS), 1731;
Works
A natural history of Ireland, in three parts, by several hands (Dublin:
by and for George Grierson 1726), 4o [copy in Marsh’s
Library].
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References
Muriel McCarthy, Hibernia Resurgens: Catalogue of Marsh’s
Library (Dublin 1994): A natural history of Ireland [ &c.]
Part I reprints Gerard Boate’s Ireland’s Naturall History (1652); Part 2 contains a collection of papers communicated to the
Royals Society in London, including those by William Molyneux on petrifying
qualities of Lough Neagh, William King on the bogs and loughs of Ireland,
and St George Ashe on the virtues of ‘mackenboy’, along with
Foley’s account of the ‘the gyants’s causeway’ which
contains an engraved plate of the ‘Prospect by Edwin Sandys, 1696’;
the third part contains Thomas Molyneux’s theories of ‘Danish
mounds’ (e.g., Newgrange) and round tower; Walter Harris called him
‘a handsome man in his Person, of a sweet affable Temper, and a religious
Life and Conversation’, in his update edn. of Ware’s Writers
of Ireland. [McCarthy, p.68.]
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