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LISTER, MARTIN (christened Radclive, Buckinghamshire,
England, 11 April 1639; d. Epsom, England,
2 February 1712), zoology, geology.
been suggested, ranging from the supernatural theories
of Paracelsus to those of writers such as Palissy and
Leonardo da Vinci, who accepted their animal origin.
The problem could not become of fundamental
importance, however, until the second half of the
seventeenth century, when the rejection of the idea of
spontaneous generation caused a clear distinction to
be made between the living and the nonliving. The
controversy was centered in England, where the
interest in natural theology made important any
evidence for the Noachian flood and the interest in
natural history encouraged the collection of fossils
and the gathering of reliable information on them.
In the period 1660-1690 an animal origin was generally
accepted in England for formed stones; but those
natural philosophers accepting this idea, such as
Robert Hooke and John Ray, were not themselves
collectors and systematizers of fossils. The men with
greatest firsthand knowledge of the subject--Martin
Lister, Edward Lhwyd, Robert Plot, John Beaumont,
and William Coles--found the difficulties of explaining
the distribution of fossils too great for them to accept
their dispersal by a universal flood; and, having a
nonevolutionary outlook, they were convinced by the
differences in detail between extant and fossil shells
that there could be no direct link between them. It is
likely that Lister's criticism of his ideas encouraged
Hooke's suggestions on the mutability of these
specific characteristics. Lister was in fact the center of
this group of collectors, and his arguments were
worked out in most detail. He noticed that the distribution
of fossil shells is correlated with the distribution
of rocks, and he believed that this was an
argument for their geological origin. In tracing the
distribution of one particular fossil through a certain
rock formation across half of England, he came close
to a stratigraphical use for these formed stones (being
interested in the classification and distribution of
rock types, Lister in 1684 made the first suggestions for
the compilation of geological maps). He explained the
growth of fossils in rock as a complex crystallization
from lapidifying juices found naturally in the earth.
Living mollusks were also able to secrete such juices,
from which, by a nonvital process, their shells crystallized;
in fact he tried to grow such shells from the
body juices of mollusks.
Lister's energies were, from the middle 1690's,
concerned mainly with the College of Physicians, of
which he was censor in 1694. In 1698 he accompanied
Lord Portland as paid physician on his embassy to
Paris; his account of the city, satirized at the time for
its attention to detail, is now a valuable source book.
In 1702 he was appointed one of Queen Anne's
physicians, apparently largely through the influence
of his niece, Sarah Churchill. This influence, and his
philosophical activities, appear to have helped to make
Lister unpopular among his fellow physicians. He
was, however, a difficult man in any case; and the
only close friends he ever had appear to have been
John Ray in the 1670's and Edward Lhwyd in the
1690's.
After 1700 Lister almost ceased scientific activity,
although he did publish some medical works. His
attempt at a comprehensive physiology, Dissertatio de
humoribus (1709), is extremely speculative, containing
little observation or experiment. It was old-fashioned
in its reliance on humors, and Lister was unsympathetic
to the mathematical physiologists of
his day--Keill, Friend, and Pitcairne. The book
completes the course of Lister's work, from the
diligent and original fieldworker of 1670, through the
laboratory anatomist and systematist of 1690, to the
armchair philosopher of 1709. The superficiality of
much of Lister's thought, largely concealed by his
early enthusiasm, was now obvious.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ORIGINAL WORKS.
Historiae animalium Angliae tres
tractatus (London, 1678), despite the title, has four sections,
covering spiders, land snails, freshwater and saltwater
mollusks, and fossil shells; the latter has a separate
preface and all have individual title pages. An appendix
to this work was issued in 1685, bound in with the Latin
ed. by Goedart. A German trans. of the spider section by
J. A. E. Goeze was published as Naturgeschichte der Spinnen
(Quendlingburg-Blankenburg, 1778).
De fontibus medicatis Angliae, exercitatio nova et prior
(York, 1682) is an account of medical mineral waters and
includes an outline of Lister's physiological system. Rev.
and enl. eds. were published as De thermis et fontibus
medicatis Angliae (London, 1684); and Exercitationes et
descriptiones thermarum et fontium medicatorum Angliae
(London, 1685; 1689).
Johannes Geodartius of Insects. Done Into English and
Methodized. With the Addition of Notes (York, 1682) has
Lister's notes as a substantial part of the whole and new
plates by F. Place. A Latin version was published by the
Royal Society as J. Goedartius de insectis in methodum
redactum (London, 1685).
Letters and Divers Other Mixt Discourses in Natural
Philosophy (York, 1683) is a collection of papers, almost
all of which had been published in the Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society.
Historia sive synopsis methodica conchyliorum (London,
1685-1692; 2nd ed., London, 1692-1697) is bibliographically
extremely complex. It was published in parts, and
few copies appear to be identical. A number of bound sets
of samples of the earlier sheets, issued with the title De
cochleis, about 1685, survive; it is debatable whether they
