Thomas Gray Manuscripts : Thomas Gray, ‘Pisces alii’

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray Manuscripts

Alongside his annotated books, pocket books, and Commonplace Book, Gray made notes on his reading and observations on loose leaves of paper. He usually used these at an earlier stage in his studies of a particular topic, or to organise information as he collated it from multiple sources. This example of Gray’s loose notes relates to his interests in both natural history and classical texts. It is a list headed ‘Pisces alii, qui in M: Mediterraneo habitant, de quorum nominibus Græcis Romanisve nihil scimus’ – that is, other fish, who live in the Mediterranean sea, of whose names we know nothing from the Greeks and Romans. On the verso of the leaf, after Gray finished his list of these fish, he wrote a shorter list headed ‘Amphibia, Nantes’ – that is, amphibians and swimming creatures, although in fact it comprises three types of ray and three types of shark. Gray noted how many items there were in each list – 45 and 6 respectively – after each title. He also noted each species name in Latin on the left-hand side, given as Linnaean binomials with the generic name first and the specific name in brackets. Opposite each name, on the right-hand side, he noted the species’ names in other languages, including English but also Italian, French, modern Greek (written in Roman script), and German, abbreviated as ‘It:’, ‘Fr:’, ‘Gr: Mod:’, and ‘Germ:’.This interest in recording and comparing the names of species in many languages is evident in Gray’s other natural history notes, for example in his interleaved, annotated copy of the tenth edition of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1758-1759), now GEN Nor 2103.2 in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Like Gray, Linnaeus was a consummate list-maker. Lists bring things together without specifying causal, temporal, or hierarchical relationships; they organise information by grouping it unsystematically rather than by ranking or differentiating it. From his youth, Gray had been deeply attracted to this mode of organising knowledge across many fields, as the many lists throughout his Commonplace Book also show. Like the Lockean method of organising a commonplace book that Gray adopted, a list is an open-ended rather than a finite or fixed genre, because new information can always be added to it. And like many of the entries in Gray’s Commonplace Book, a list also usually results from assimilating and combining information during discontinuous or consultation reading of many sources, rather than from copying just one. In this respect, it is striking that Gray left space beneath his lists of fish and swimming creatures and did not alphabetise them, for alphabetisation would have made it harder to add new items. Yet the uniformity of these lists is equally striking. There is no revision and no evidence of Gray changing pen or ink. He seems to have written both sides of the sheet in one sitting, perhaps after first compiling the information less formally elsewhere. Its neatness is further evidence of the worth he attributed to list-making. This is not a rough draft but a document he valued in its own right.Like other items in this collection, this list sheds light on Gray’s practices as a natural historian and how he organised scientific information. As a catalogue of aquatic species that are not mentioned in the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, it also illuminates the intersection of Gray’s scientific interests with his classical learning, and his long-standing enthusiasm for mapping modern knowledge onto ancient, also evident in the studies in ancient geography in his Commonplace Book. It was published in this digital edition in November 2024, with editorial and bibliographical metadata by Ruth Abbott, and images courtesy of The Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge.Ruth Abbott University of Cambridge <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a> How to cite: Thomas Gray, ‘Pisces alii’ (GBR/1058/GRA/4/9)’, 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>