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.
[1] 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[note 2] and was reckoned "the wealthiest commoner in the North of Ireland, possessing it is said between ten and twenty thousand pounds a year".
[6] His examination performance at Cambridge was unimpressive,[note 4] perhaps indicating he neglected the necessary preparatory work in favour of studying natural history and science.
[8] 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".
[12] 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.
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.
[note 10] 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).
Ogilby's study convinced him that the presence and architecture of hands were key indicators of relationship patterns among certain mammals, and he proposed recognition of a separate mammiferous order to be called cheiropoda (possessing hands) made up of bimana (comprising only man), quadrumana and pedimana (comprising, respectively, monkeys of the Old World and monkeys of the New World).
[28] In 1838 he enshrined its basis in his 442-page book, The Natural History of Monkeys, Opossums, and Lemurs, published by Knight for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge as part of the popular series The Menageries.
A first draft of a regulatory code prepared by Strickland was circulated in February 1842, Darwin marking it with his comments and forwarding it to Ogilby (both men's manuscript observations survive).
The very existence of the working party attracted hostility at the assembly, notably from J. E. Gray, Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum, with whom Ogilby had a history of bickering over nomenclature.
[note 14] As a result Strickland's draft was not adopted in Manchester but, after further revision to reflect comment by members of the working party, was included in the group's report which was printed in the Science Association's Proceedings.
In December of the following year he tendered his resignation as Secretary of the Zoological Society, explaining that circumstances required his presence on the estate where "I am myself giving daily employment to from thirty to forty heads of families to keep them from actual starvation".
[39] Once established there he became a member of the local Relief Committee and obtained a loan of £6,000 from the Commission of Public Works in order to reclaim parts of his land for agricultural purposes.
[43] When, in 1852, the Science Association held its annual assembly in Belfast, he was President of its Zoological Section and read a paper "On the Geographical Distribution of Animals in Connexion with the Progress of Civilization".
[48] When he took up residence in Ireland his wife initially remained at their house in London's Hanover Terrace while suitable accommodation was built for them on the Irish estate.
His second wife, Adelaide Douglas, was a daughter of the local Rector at Donagheady, a niece of the Earl of Morton and a cousin of the Marquess of Abercorn.
This extravagant structure, built with cut stone brought from Dungiven, resembled a castellated factory but became, albeit briefly, an attractive entertainment destination for fashionable Irish society.
In 1868 he delivered a paper "On the Motions of the Moon" to the Royal Irish Academy,[58] and in 1872 he published A New Theory of the Figure of the Earth[59] in which he declared that, in pre-spheroidal form, the planets "revolved in their orbits for countless ages before they began to rotate normally about their axes".