A BRLSI Publication

Based on the works life & times of one
of the Institution’s
most distinguished Members.

Leonard Jenyns:
Darwin’s Lifelong Friend
Edited by:
Professor Ian Wallace
Second limited edition published 2005

Leonard Jenyns (1800-1893) was an eminent Victorian naturalist, and one of BRLSI’s most distinguished members. He was the author of several important works, amongst them A Manual of British Vertebrate Animals (1836), Observations in Natural History (1846), and his memoir of JS Henslow, Darwin’s mentor (1862).
After serving as Vicar of Swaffham Bulbeck near Cambridge for 38 years, Jenyns moved to the Bath area in 1850. In 1855 he co-founded the Bath Natural History & Antiquarian Field Club. He presented a large collection of shells and an impressive herbarium to the BRLSI along with his substantial scientific library. These are still an important part of the Institution’s holdings, as is the Jenyns Correspondence, which consists of almost 700 letters from correspondents and stretches from 1817 until the 1870s. Amongst his correspondents were eminent men of science such as Charles Darwin and Sir Joseph Hooker.
In his autobiography, Chapters in My Life (1889), Jenyns recounts how he was invited to join the Beagle as its resident naturlist – a post subsequently given to the young Charles Darwin with historic consequences. It was Jenyns who subsequently edited the monograph of the ‘Fishes’ for the Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle published in 1840.

A BRLSI Publication, 2005.