Natural Awakenings: Early Naturalists in Lakeland by Ian D. Hodkinson (CWAAS, £20).

John Gough was blinded before his third birthday as a result of smallpox. He was born in Kendal in 1757.

Remarkably he became a very capable mathematician and classicist and most remarkably he became one of Cumbria’s greatest naturalists.

He learnt by touch and through the observations of friends. He collected plants and animals and he experimented with growing plants in various locations. At a time when few people recorded the weather, he kept a meticulous record of the weather over several years.

For several years he taught John Dalton, the discoverer of the atom. and they shared a keen interest in meteorology. He studied the conditions under which plants germinate and he sought to understand the migration of birds. Despite his blindness he made a significant contribution to the knowledge of his day.

John Gough is just one of the 11 naturalists included in this pioneering study of the men (and they are all men) who were fascinated by the rich diversity of plant and animal life in Cumbria. The county, with its mountains and valleys and coastal plains and cliffs, probably has a greater variety of habitats than any other similar area of the country.

Thomas Lawson, who was born in 1630, collected plants and contributed to the work of John Rae, one of the great plant classifiers.

William Nicolson, who was said to have been born in the porch of Great Orton Church, became bishop of Carlisle. But he was also an eminent student of languages, one of the county’s most important antiquarians and a great observer of nature.

John Robinson had a more mercenary interest in plants than the bishop. He collected specimens of plants and fossils which he sold to scholars in Oxford, but the work of this journeyman cobbler was nevertheless of importance.

Another clergyman was the eccentric Thomas Robinson, the vicar of Ousby. He wrote An Essay Towards A Natural History of Cumberland and Westmoreland, in which he offered his own interpretation of the nature of creation.

Another journeyman cobbler was John Wilson, who was born in Longsleddale in 1696. he published a Synopsis of British Plants.

John Hudson from Kendal found himself at the heart of the English botanical world when he became Demonstrator at the Society of Apothecaries Chelsea Physic Garden. He wrote a Flora Anglica.

Dr John Heysham, who lived from 1753 to 1834, spent most of his life as a physician in Carlisle, where he did important work on public health. He also compiled the first extensive account of the animals of Cumberland.

Ian Hodkinson is Professor Emeritus in Biological and Environmental Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University. In researching the lives of these 11 men, he is looking at the work of his predecessors. They emerge as a varied and interested group of men intent on acquiring a clearer understanding of the natural world.

This book makes a very important contribution to a part of the history of Cumbria which is largely forgotten.

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