Thomas Gray Manuscripts : Thomas Gray, Naturalist’s Journal

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray Manuscripts

Thomas Gray was a lifelong natural historian, having first studied the subject with his uncle, Robert Antrobus, during his school days at Eton College. His friend and fellow student Horace Walpole recalled that Gray was already ‘a considerable botanist at fifteen’. Walpole – son of Sir Robert Walpole, the First Minister – took Gray as his companion on the Grand Tour of Europe between 1739 and 1741, which prompted Gray to establish an equally sustained habit of documenting and sharing observations on his travels. Domestic travel became especially important to him, and although Cambridge remained his base, throughout his life he spent considerable portions of every year elsewhere. Walpole’s Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Thomas Wharton’s Old Park near Durham, and the home of Gray’s mother and aunts at Stoke Poges became at once retreats and starting points. From them Gray toured the country houses, castles, cathedrals, and natural landscapes of England – and later Scotland and the Highlands, Cumberland and Westmoreland, and Wales. Travel allowed Gray to observe the varied wildlife and contrasting climates in different parts of the country. The love of botany already noticeable at Eton gradually deepened into passion and expertise, both practical and theoretical. He meticulously recorded his observations in printed diaries such as the pocket books he used in 1755 and 1760, both digitised in this collection (<a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00001'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00001/1</a>; <a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00002'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00002/1</a>). He also shared those observations in letters to Wharton, who sent Gray observations in return.In eighteenth-century natural history, the circulation of handwritten data in correspondence was the norm. Understanding that greater knowledge could be achieved if information from many different observers could be systematically compared, natural historians of this period also favoured uniformity in data records, which depended upon each individual using comparable instruments, terminology, observational techniques, and representational formats. Linnaean classification and Fahrenheit’s newly-reliable thermometer were important steps towards achieving this kind of uniformity, and Gray used both; he even had his copy of the ground-breaking tenth edition of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1758-1759) interleaved to make space for the minute annotations, additions, corrections, and specimen drawings with which he would fill it over the 1760s. Equally significant were standardised note-taking methods that allowed information to be compared with ease. Gray’s investigations of the natural world were increasingly influenced by such tools and values over the decades he dedicated to studying it.The nature journal presented here represents a step towards greater uniformity in recording natural observations. Titled The Naturalist’s Journal, it was a printed diary devised by Daines Barrington, a friend of Gray’s and a fellow naturalist and antiquary. Barrington explained in his preface that he had followed prompts given by the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet in Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick (1759), and the Calendar of Flora added from the second edition. Stillingfleet was a disciple of Linnaeus who disseminated Linnaean ideas to English audiences. His Calendar of Flora enabled comparison between the progress of the seasons in Uppsala in Sweden, and Stratton in Norfolk, measured by changes in plant and bird life in 1755. Gray knew Stillingfleet, and on 31 January 1761 he copied out information from Stillingfleet’s Calendar in a letter to Wharton. In this letter, alongside the observations from Uppsala and Stratton in 1755, Gray added his own Cambridge observations, drawn from his pocket book for that same year (<a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00001'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00001/1</a>). Like Gray, Barrington grasped the interest of the comparisons facilitated by Stillingfleet’s Calendar. Barrington devised The Naturalist’s Journal to enable more individuals to keep similar records in a uniform format, which could ultimately enable a General Natural History of the nation.Each page of The Naturalist’s Journal comprises a printed table of blank boxes. Printed headings down the left-hand side of each table assign each row to a day of the week. Each day is further sub-divided into times – 8am, 12pm, 4pm, and 8pm – so that hourly variations can be recorded. Printed headings across the top of each table direct the information to be recorded in each column, including barometer and thermometer readings, inches of rain or snow, the weather, trees first in leaf and fungi first appearing, plants first in flower and mosses vegetating, birds and insects appearing or disappearing, observations on fish and other animals, and a looser category, ‘Miscellaneous Observations, and Memorandums’. There are also printed headings prompting the user to record the year, place, and soil type on each page.The Naturalist’s Journal was a large, oblong publication, and it was therefore unlikely to travel easily with its user out into the fields, as Gray’s pocket books did. Yet it found many eighteenth-century adherents besides Gray, especially among those who like Gray were Barrington’s friends. The naturalist Gilbert White, who addressed many of the letters making up The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) to Barrington, used The Naturalist’s Journal to record observations between 1768 and 1793. Each copy of The Naturalist’s Journal had space for a year of daily entries, so White used many copies over the years, and even had several interleaved to make space for additional notes (Add MSS 31846-31851, British Library). Between 1775 and 1787, one John Wightwick likewise recorded observations in copies of The Naturalist’s Journal, from which he removed the front and back matter so he could bind them together in a continuous run (General Reference Collection Cup.406.h.7, British Library). Like White and Wightwick, Gray used several copies of The Naturalist’s Journal – three copies of the first issue, published by W. Sandby in Fleet Street in 1767, and one copy of the second issue published by Benjamin White, also in Fleet Street, c. 1770 – and they are now bound together, each copy containing just thirty leaves including a title page, a preface by Barrington, and an exemplar with printed entries followed by 55 pages of printed tables.Gray began using The Naturalist’s Journal in 1767, when he recorded high wind from the north east and deep snow falls in the relevant boxes on Friday 2 January. Rather than filling every box on every page, he entered information selectively, usually concentrating on thermometer temperatures, wind directions, weather descriptions, and sightings of flora and fauna. He was less focused on weather than John Wightwick, who recorded barometer, thermometer, wind, and weather observations at least four times a day. He was less descriptive than Gilbert White, who narrated natural occurrences at some length and recorded local anecdotes alongside observations. But he was more interested in recording and classifying his sightings of species than either of these other users of The Naturalist’s Journal. Species classification of the plants, birds, animals, fish, and insects that he observed was a special focus of his notes. Moreover, unlike the anonymous 1832 user of The Naturalist’s Journal now preserved in the Cambridge Zoology Library (0 selb 58, Zoology Library, University of Cambridge), Gray generally used Latin to name the species he saw on a given day, and specifically Linnaean binomials, the two-part names giving genus and species of which homo sapiens is now the most well-known. He could have cited many such binomials from memory, but it is clear that he consulted his Linnaeus while making these entries because he sometimes added comments noting how Linnaeus described the species in question, and even quoted and corrected Linneaus’s accounts. Gray was not simply a desk naturalist, however. His notes reveal that he personally inspected bird, animal, and fish specimens, some of which were still alive when he handled them, and some of which he cooked and tasted.As well as Latin and English, Gray used numbers and symbols to record information in The Naturalist’s Journal, such as temperature and wind direction. Place and time mattered in eighteenth-century scientific observations, and on occasion Gray went so far as to record temperatures at multiple times during the same day and compare temperatures in a garden and a room with a fire. He also regularly compared thermometer readings from different parts of the country, drawing on records published in learned journals or shared by friends such as Wharton and William Mason from their homes of Old Park and Aston, abbreviated by Gray as ‘O:P:’ and ‘A:’. Like Stillingfleet and Barrington, Gray valued such comparative data. He entered sightings by Wharton and Mason of plants, insects, and birds as well, which allowed him to compare rates of seasonal change in different parts of the country. This did not mean that he ignored what was happening closer to home. Many of his notes on the flowering of plants actually record the progress of bulbs that he grew in his own rooms in Cambridge.Gray documented his movements around the country in The Naturalist’s Journal too, using its left-hand margin to note travel locations and distances. In comparison to the more limited travels recorded by White, Wightwick, and the anonymous user whose Naturalist’s Journal is now in the Cambridge Zoology Library – indeed by any standards – Gray’s were impressive in number and range. Because of the care with which he documented them, The Naturalist’s Journal provides a vast amount of additional information that considerably supplements and corrects what is already known about his biography. His entries were especially dense and detailed during his travels, often overspilling the printed grid. Travelling exposed him to different species, and to new sights that he recorded under ‘Miscellaneous Observations’, including regional landmarks, soil types, local harvests, and the food available in markets and served in lodgings. Many such entries read more like a travel journal than like a nature diary, and they are sometimes phrased as instructions for friends or his future self advising on the best routes and sights. While the frequency of his observations about weather and species never flagged, as he explored the country he also noted the distances he journeyed, the inns he stayed in, and the sights he enjoyed. In contrast, he made fewer observations while resident in Cambridge or London. Sometimes he simply gave up recording information during these periods, and wrote them off in notes that summarise the weather over several months; this means that his copies of The Naturalist’s Journal do not respect the calendar year. His entries became especially patchy as his health declined in late 1770 and early 1771, when gout often confined him indoors. During this period he regularly attributed the observations he was able to record in The Naturalist’s Journal to friends such as his fellow Cambridge antiquary Michael Tyson, or to species that had been brought to him in college rather than observed in the field.Gray’s other travel manuscripts reveal that he developed travel notes in several stages. Earlier stage manuscripts comprise brief abbreviated records and lists. In later documents and letters to friends, these became the evocative descriptive sentences familiar from celebrated manuscripts such as Gray’s accounts of the Grand Tour. The travel notes Gray made in The Naturalist’s Journal are an example of the early, abbreviated stage of this process. Sometimes they document journeys of which scarcely a record has survived, such as his tour with Nicholls into Wales in 1770 during which the friends travelled by boat down the Wye and climbed in the Black Mountains. At other times they can be compared to fuller, more descriptive versions of the same information relayed in letters and travel diaries about the same trips, such as the journal of Gray’s tour of the Lakes in 1769.Most of Gray’s preferred forms for recording and processing the vast knowledge that he accumulated over his life share qualities with The Naturalist’s Journal. As many items in this collection illustrate, he liked to make lists, chronologies, and bibliographies. He also liked the accumulative, miscellaneous organisation of his indexed Lockean Commonplace Book, in preference to an alphabetised commonplace book with predetermined headings written into the book in advance. The comparably accumulative weekly grid format of his pocket books and The Naturalist’s Journal had a similar appeal. Such formats suited him because they were open-ended. He could always make additions when he encountered new information and fresh observations, and knowledge therefore never needed to seem finite or constrained.Another reason that the format of The Naturalist’s Journal suited Gray was because it facilitated sharing. Gathering knowledge in a patterned, organised document, whether commonplace book or weekly printed journal, meant that he could easily retrieve information at will, recopy it elsewhere, and share it with friends. Enlightenment scholars thought of themselves as part of a Republic of Letters in which knowledge advanced through sociability, correspondence, and the free exchange of information. The collaboration between Gray and Wharton on display in The Naturalist’s Journal is a testament to this culture. Not only did Wharton provide much of the comparative information that Gray recorded in these pages, he was the recipient of its information as well. Take Gray’s records on 8 December 1767. Here he noted that during his stay in London the weather was ‘commonly open, mild, & damp. Wind usually West, varying to the South or North.’ In a letter to Wharton on 28 December, Gray copied this information almost verbatim when summarising his sojourn: ‘the weather was commonly open, damp, & mild, with the wind in the West, veering either to N: or S:’. He then shared information about the plants he had observed and noted in The Naturalist’s Journal on 13-14 December, and the temperatures he had recently recorded. For Gray and Wharton, The Naturalist’s Journal was at once the result and the occasion of friendship – just as it was for Daines Barrington, its creator, and Gilbert White, his friend.In 1937, William Powell Jones influentially described Gray’s scholarship as his tragedy. To Jones, scholarship was a waste of Gray’s life: too unproductive, and too isolated from the world. Gray’s copies of The Naturalist’s Journal show that Jones was wrong. One of the very last entries that Gray made, on 15 May 1771 not long before his death on 30 July, exemplifies the practicality, the sociability, and the mobility of eighteenth-century natural history. ‘Saw the Scolopax Lapponica, four of them were taken in Norfolk, & brought alive into Benet-College Garden’, Gray recorded. Now known as Limosa lapponica, the bar-tailed godwits that Gray saw were brought all the way from Norfolk into what is now Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This was not Gray’s college, so he must have been invited to observe them by friends. Even in Cambridge, then, and only a couple of months before he died, pursuing the study of natural history meant leaving his rooms in Pembroke and joining what might have been quite a crowd, to see real birds captured in a neighbouring county. The day was bright and fine, and it was hot, with a brisk wind from the south east.Like other items in this collection, such as Gray’s 1755 and 1760 pocket books and the list he headed ‘Pisces alii, qui in M: Mediterraneo habitant, de quorum nominibus Græcis Romanisve nihil scimus’ (<a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00001'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00001/1</a>; <a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00002'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00002-00002/1</a>; <a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00004-00009'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00004-00009/1</a>), the print-manuscript hybrid document presented here sheds light on Gray’s practices as a natural historian and how he organised scientific information. It also offers uniquely detailed and vivid insights into how, where, and why he travelled across the British Isles between 1767 and his death in 1771. It was published in this digital edition in October 2025, with editorial and bibliographical metadata by Ruth Abbott, and images courtesy of Eton College Library.Ruth Abbott University of Cambridge <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a> How to cite: Thomas Gray, ‘Naturalist’s Journal (MS 954, Eton College Library)’, ed. Ruth Abbott, in Thomas Gray Manuscripts, ed. Ruth Abbott, assoc. ed. Ephraim Levinson, <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a>