Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk: More Especially on the Birds and FishesBrowne, Thomas, Sir
History
Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk: More Especially on the Birds and Fishes
Browne, Thomas, Sir
Natural history -- England -- Norfolk
[D] _Simon Wilkin_ (1790-1862), the able editor of Sir Thomas
Browne's collected works, was born at Costessey near Norwich, in
the year 1790. He came to Norwich after his father's death in 1799,
taking up his temporary abode with his guardian, Joseph Kinghorn, a
Baptist minister of note and a prominent member of a literary
circle then existing in Norwich, by whom his education was
superintended. On arriving at man's estate and being at that time
possessed of ample means, he devoted himself to the study of
Natural History, especially to Entomology, and was the possessor of
a large collection of insects which, in the year 1827, was
purchased for the Norwich Museum at a cost of one hundred guineas,
a large sum in those days. He was one of the founders and the first
librarian of the Norfolk and Norwich Literary Institution in 1822,
also of the Norfolk and Norwich Museum in 1825, both of which
institutions (the former reunited to its parent Library, founded in
1784) are still flourishing. Wilkin was a Fellow of the Linnean
Society, also a Member of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh. In
later years the loss of the bulk of his property by a commercial
failure necessitated his turning his attention to some means of
earning a livelihood, and he established himself in Norwich as a
printer and publisher; later in life he removed to Hampstead, where
he died on 28th July, 1862, and was buried in his native village of
Costessey.
[E] Some copies of this Edition have a title-page, bearing the name
of H. G. Bohn as publisher, and the date of 1846, but differing
only in that respect.
The foot-notes in Wilkin's edition, many of them very curious,
initialled "Wr.," are by Dr. Christopher Wren, Dean of Windsor (father
of the Architect of St. Paul's Cathedral), and were found on the margins
of a copy of the first edition of the _Pseudodoxia_ now preserved in the
Bodleian Library at Oxford; those initialled "G." were written for
Wilkin's first edition by the late Miss Anna Gurney, of Northrepps, near
Cromer, Norfolk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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