William Ogilby (1805 – 1 September 1873) was an Irish-born zoologist who was at the forefront of classification and naming of animal species in the 1830s and served as Secretary of the Zoological Society of London from 1839 to 1847. He removed to Ireland during the Great Famine and later built the grand but architecturally dismal Altinaghree Castle near Donemana, County Tyrone. Mount Ogilby in Queensland was named for him in 1846.
Birth, family background and education Probably born in County Londonderry in 1805, William Ogilby was an illegitimate son of Leslie Ogilby (c1764-1845) who owned a bleaching green at Lackagh in the parish of Dungiven.Will of Leslie Ogilby of Upper Dorset Street, Dublin, 18: TNA, PROB 11/202/289. The Ogilbys had been active in the linen trade since the mid-eighteenth century, and William's uncle Robert Ogilby (c1761-1839), having amassed a fortune as a linen factor in Dublin, bought the lease of the 22,000-acre Dungiven Castle estate and was reckoned "the wealthiest commoner in the North of Ireland, possessing it is said between ten and twenty thousand pounds a year".John Pitt Kennedy, Instruct; Employ; Don’t Hang Them, or Ireland Tranquilized without Soldiers, Thomas and William Boone, London, 1835, pp. 73–75. The fortune of William's father was more modest but sufficient to buy the 3,170-acre Terkernaghan and Altnachree estate in Donagheady, County Tyrone, in 1829.William J. Roulston, Three Centuries of Life in a Tyrone Parish: A History of Donagheady from 1600 to 1900, Strabane History Society, 2010, p. 187, citing Register of Deeds, Dublin, 854.137.570639; Dublin Evening Post, 28 May 1828.
Illegitimate births were commonplace among the Ogilbys in the early nineteenth century, and William seems to have been recognised as his father's heir from an early age. He was educated at a small academy kept by a clergyman in MacclesfieldWill of Leslie Ogilby. before proceeding to Belfast Academical Institution and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1824. He graduated in 1828J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part II, Vol. IV (Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 582. and was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1832.Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Parishes of County Londonderry IV, 1824, 1833–5, Roe Valley Upper: Dungiven, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University of Belfast, 1991, p. 54.
His examination performance at Cambridge was unimpressive, perhaps indicating he neglected the necessary preparatory work in favour of studying natural history and science. His interest in the natural world was of early origin and may have been kindled by relatives. His uncle Alexander Ogilby (c1756-1846) of Kilcatten House, Claudy, had a "curious and valuable collection of fossils" in his "choice little museum"; his maiden aunt Elizabeth Ogilby of Limavady "saved from the ravages of the lapidiary" a natural crystal which, weighing 70lbs, was in 1814 believed to be the largest in Ireland;Rev. George Vaughan Sampson, A Memoir Explanatory of the Chart and Survey of the County of Londonderry, Ireland, London, 1814, p. 81; William Shaw Mason, A Statistical Account or Parochial Survey of Ireland, drawn up from the Communications of the Clergy, Vol. I (1814), p. 292. and his older cousin, Leslie Ogilby, was an "accomplished naturalist and botanist" who successfully cultivated Ireland's rarer native plants and whose bequest of 400 books on scientific topics was an important addition to the Royal Dublin Society's library.Charles Farran, "Panegyric on Mr M’Alla and other Irish Botanists", in The Phytologist: a popular botanical miscellany, Vol. II, John Van Voorst, London, 1845, pp. 742–746 (for Leslie Ogilby's "Notes on a Botanical Ramble in Connemara and Arean", see pp. 345–351); Saunders's Newsletter, 8 February 1853.
Research and first publication Over the course of a fortnight in March 1827, while still an undergraduate, William Ogilby examined at Cambridge a living specimen of the species he called the "whitefooted Paraduxure". He examined it again in London in August 1828, by which time he was sufficiently conversant with the organic structure of animals and the principles of taxonomy to recognise the creature as a previously undescribed species which he classified as intermediate between the common genet and the common cat and to which he assigned the name Paradoxurus leucopus. His description and classification of the animal appeared in a paper which was printed in The Zoological Journal of January 1829 and was the earliest among his many published contributions to zoological research. The species he identified was included in Coenraad Temminck's 1839 monograph on the genus Paradoxurus.Temminck, Monographies de Mammalogie, Vol. ii, 1839; Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1885, p. 785-6.
Ogilby's arrival in London gave him access to the works of Continental naturalists and to specimens of animals and birds held by the British Museum, the Zoological and Linnean Societies, and the East India Company. He later became a regular visitor to the museums at Leiden and Paris, and he observed animal locomotion and behaviour at the Zoological Society's Regent's Park menagerie, the Surrey Zoological Gardens at Newington, the Menagerie du Jardin des plantes at Paris, and in private collections such as that of Lord Derby. He visited Germany (notably Berlin and Frankfurt) on several occasions and the Cape Colony more than once.Proceedings of the Zoological Society, Part VI, 1838, p. 63; Part VIII, 1840, p. 35; Part XI, 1843, p. 10; Annals of Natural History, or Magazine of Zoology, Botany and Geology, Vol. I, R. & J. E. Taylor, London, 1838, p. 429; The Natural History of Monkeys, Opossums and Lemurs, Charles Knight, London, 1838, pp. 120, 169, 289, 315, 342, 368, 378, 396, 412–415; Liverpool Record Office – Papers of Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby: Letterbooks 1839–43, File 3, f.183 Letter of 27 March 1843, Ogilby to Lord Derby.
The breadth of his knowledge of literary sources from which useful natural history material could be quarried was evident when he alerted Professor Thomas Bell to an editorial note in Swift's Considerations about Maintaining the Poor referring to the importation of frogs to Dublin from England at the beginning of the eighteenth century.See Thomas Bell, FRS, History of British Reptiles, John Van Voorst, London, 1839, at p. 86.
Zoological Society contributions and appointment From 1830 onwards, at meetings of the Zoological Society, he read explanatory papers or delivered commentaries on specimens donated to the Society's museum. Some forty of his reports were printed in either full or abstract form in the Society's Transactions and Proceedings during the years to 1841, describing and classifying new examples of mammals and birds from Australia, Africa, the Americas and India.Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Index 1830–1847, London, Longman, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1866, pp. 59–62. In the same period he also read similar papers to the Linnean Society and commented on fossil specimens to the Geological Society.W. Ogilby, "Observations on the Structure and Relations of the Presumed Marsupial Remains from the Stonesfield Oolite", Proceedings of the Geological Society of London, Vol. III, 1838–1839, No. 60, pp. 21–23. Publication of his classifications established and named the several genera Cynictis (1833), Madoqua (1836), Pseudocheirus (1837), Chaeropus and Conilurus (1838),Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, Part I, 1833, p. 48; Part IV, 1836, pp. 25–28 and 137; Part VI, 1838, pp. 25–27; Magazine of Natural History, Vol. I, new series, p. 457; Transactions of the Linnean Society, Vol. XVIII (1841), pp. 121–132. and placed many new species within previously established genera.
He chaired meetings of the Zoological Society from 1836Proceedings of the Zoological Society, Part IV, 1836, p. 54. and by 1838 was not only one of its Fellows but also a Fellow of the Linnean, Geological and Royal Astronomical Societies.Annals of Natural History, Vol. I, p. 216; Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 45 (1889), Proceedings, p. 46; Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. V, Priestley & Weale, London, 1833, p. 428. He was on terms of friendship with Charles Darwin, the Secretary of the Geographical Society, and in 1839 both men were elected to the Council of the Zoological Society,Morning Chronicle, 30 April 1839. Ogilby becoming that Society's Secretary shortly afterwards.Morning Chronicle, 5 July 1839. In this latter capacity he conducted the Society's correspondence, controlled and catalogued its museum, recorded the animals in its zoological gardens and made recommendations for their purchase.Christine Brandon-Jones, "Edward Blyth, Charles Darwin and the Animal Trade in Nineteenth Century India and Britain", Journal of the History of Biology, No. 30, 1997, p. 161.
After his appointment as Secretary his contribution of scholarly papers and commentaries to Zoological Society meetings declined. He last named a species (Cercopithecus tantalus – the Tantalus monkey) in April 1841, and his final classification submission was made in January 1843.Proceedings of the Zoological Society, Part IX, 1841, p. 33; Part XI, 1843, p. 11. He continued as Secretary of the Society until resigning in 1847. He had been unremunerated in the post and was succeeded by a salaried official.Sofia Akerberg, Knowledge and Pleasure at Regent's Park: the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London during the Nineteenth Century, Department of Historical Studies, Umea University, Sweden, 2001, p. 125.
Recognition His "careful researches which have thrown considerable light on the affinities of the Ruminant species" were acknowledged in 1838 when George Waterhouse named a new species of antelope after him (Cephalophus ogilbii, or Ogilby's duiker). In the previous year W. H. Sykes had dedicated to him ("whose contributions to natural history are so well known") the discovery of a new member of the carp family in the Bihama River (Rohtee ogilbii).Transactions of the Zoological Society, Part VI, 1838, pp. 60–61; Part V, 1837, pp. 161–162.
In 1846 Sir Thomas Mitchell, after whom Ogilby had named Dipus mitchellii (Mitchell's hopping mouse) in 1838, reciprocated by the naming of Mount Ogilby in the Maranoa River region of Queensland, numbering Ogilby among "the individuals of our own race most distinguished or zealous in the advancement of science and the pursuit of human knowledge... sufficiently well-known in the world to preclude all necessity for further explanation why their names were applied to a part of the world's geography".Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria, 1848, Chapter V, entry for 18 June 1846.
The order called Chiropoda In the summer of 1829, while studying the actions and organic structure of red howler monkeys, Ogilby noticed what had previously escaped general recognition: the creatures did not use their forelimb extremities to hold objects "between finger and thumb" because their "thumbs" were positioned not opposite but in the same line as the remainder of their digits. Over the next six years he gave particular attention to the other genera of South American monkeys and observed this characteristic as common to all of them. Whereas they had previously been regarded as quadrumana (four-handed), he believed they were properly pedimana (foot-handed).