Curio

The Naturalists Companion ..., 1810–1817

The Naturalists Companion containing drawings with suitable descriptions of a vast variety of Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Serpent and Insects; & accurately copied either from Living Animals or from the stuffed Specimens in the Museums of the College and Dublin Society, to which is added drawings of several antiquities, natural productions &c containd in those Museums, 1810–1817

Kenelm Henry Digby (1800 – 1880)

SAFE / PXE 869

This compendium is essentially young Irish student Kenelm Digby’s visual diary of his tour of the museums of Trinity College Dublin (the College) and the Dublin Society in the early 1800s. He also depicted various animals he encountered, either at a public menagerie, a theatre featuring one of the ubiquitous travelling wild beast shows around that time. Digby seems to have enjoyed collecting vast amounts of information, mostly from original sources, and then collating it into encyclopaedic endeavours.

In addition to this unpublished volume, he also published a volume on the religious, social and artistic life of European people of the Middle Ages and an extensive inquiry into the scholastic system of theology. The result of his inquiries into theology was that at an early age he became a convert to Roman Catholicism.

This encyclopaedic approach reflected Digby's belief, shared by the majority of his contemporaries, that the diversity and complexity of nature was positive proof of the existence of a divine Creator. As Digby wrote in "The Naturalists Companion" his intention was to highlight to all "but the most insensible mind wonder at the formation and the various properties, and dispositions of the Brute Creation" (p 453).

The writer Kenelm Digby grew up in a Protestant family in Dublin. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, achieving a BA degree in 1819.