One of Adam's first activities was to name the plants and animals he found in the Garden of Eden. Since then it seems that naming things and knowing them have gone hand in hand, that knowledge and vocabulary have been intertwined. Local communities might name plants and animals that were important for them, the name perhaps conveying information about their use in herbal medicine or as food. Science also names things; indeed, until a species has been officially named, it is "new to science".
When Carl Linnaeus devised a new schema for naming species in the 18th century, one that conveyed information about relationships with other species, it meant that scientists from different places, cultures and even times could study nature in a new way, and agree on what it was they were studying. This scientific naming is no idle exercise, but is crucial to our understanding of natural diversity and ecology. Only by naming and knowing the plants and animals that occur in a habitat can we appreciate its environmental importance, or know how many species are being lost to extinction.
Where scientists use one unique name to identify precisely each species, local communities might have many, and their near neighbours might have others. Thus crosan was used for a starfish in Skerries, Co Dublin, but it was crosog across the bay in Dalkey. With loss of language comes an inevitable loss of lore. As the tide goes out we are left, as the poet Aidan Mathews writes, with "31 words for seaweed whitening on the shore". This intertwined history of language and nature is just one of the many themes explored in Nature in Ireland, a wonderful, eclectic collection of essays on such diverse topics that it is impossible to do justice to it in a short review, especially as this is a book that sets out to record not just the history of Irish nature - which it does admirably - but also to set the context of nature studies, exploring, even initiating, a debate that is not Nature versus Nurture, but rather Nature versus Culture.
Here are reflections on everything from folklore, legend and language to art, maps and personalities, and the clash of culture between Gael and Planter. The scope and scale of this volume (encompassing the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds, along with weather) will make it a reference book and baseline, yet one with appeal to both lay person and professional. The contributors are all experts in their field, yet many are familiar, including, for example, Brendan McWilliams on the history of Irish meteorology; Michael Viney on the traditions and technologies of huntin', shootin' and fishin'; and John Feehan on Irish attitudes to conservation.
Many of the essays are descriptive and easily read, others are more analytical and thought-provoking. These latter will take a little digesting, but this should be easy for most contributions are short (though I see the editor allows himself three long chapters totalling over a hundred pages). The book is probably best dipped into and savoured, whether for the ideas being discussed or the tantalising titbits offered along the way.
For instance, I have learned that the first record of the ship's rat in Ireland (it is not a native species) is in the Book of Kells, where cats and rats play among the illustrations, that in the early 17th century the forests of Cork and Kerry were used to cask all the wine that France and Spain could produce, and that in 1698 you needed property worth at least £1,000 to be "qualified" to kill a hare or pheasant. I marvel at the knowledge and expertise that have been brought together here, where references and extracts range over 6th-century scholars, Fenian legends, and the poetry of Seamus Heaney. Wondrous animals - such as the Corrib crocodile and the "cowstags" - peep from the pages as if from a medieval bestiary.
This book is one for anyone interested in Irish nature and culture. And it brings to a close what has been a fine year in Irish publishing in this context, including the wonderful Atlas of Rural Irish Landscape, Patrick McAfee's Stone Walls, Bowler and Whyte's Science and Society in Ireland, and a new edition of Mitchell and Ryan's Reading the Irish Landscape.
Mary Mulvihill edits Technology Ireland magazine; her guidebook to Ireland's scientific heritage will be published later this year