Life
1661-1733 [1st bart.]; b. Dublin, ed. TCD and Leyden; physician; MA and
MB TCD, 1683; MD TCD, and FRS, 1687; entered Leyden University, 1683;
issued a scientific Account of the Irish Elk (1696); wrote the
first treatise on the natural origins of the Giant’s Causeway; President
Irish College of Physicians, 1702; 1709, 1713, 1720; fnd. Dublin Asylum
for the Blind, 1711; Prof. of Medicine, TCD, 1717; issued Discourse
on Danish Forts (1725); knighted (baronet) 1730; issued zoolological
papers; his br. was William Molyneux (1656-98). ODNB DIW OCIL
Works
Discourse on Danish Forts (1725), reprinted as essay on “Danish Mounds”
with Gerard Boate’s Naturall History of Ireland (Dublin: Grierson
1725), et al. Also, Some Considerations on the Taxes Paid by Ireland
to Support the Government (1727), unpublished tract.
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Criticism
See comments in Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael: Studies
in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression
Prior To The Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Pub. Co. 1986), and bio-notice in Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988) p.125.
Commentary
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976;
1984), remarks: in 1702 a former member [of the Dublin Philosophical Society],
Thomas Molyneux, produced a paper on ancient Greek and Roman lyres published
in Transactions of Royal Society in London. [70]
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