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LISTER, MARTIN (christened Radclive, Buckinghamshire,
England, 11 April 1639; d. Epsom, England,
2 February 1712), zoology, geology.
Born into a landed family with estates in the North
and Midlands, Lister was educated at St. John's
College, Cambridge (B.A. 1658, M.A. 1662), becoming
a fellow, at the Restoration, by royal mandate; his
uncle, Sir Matthew Lister, had been physician to the
new king's mother. He studied medicine at Montpellier
from 1663 to 1666 but did not graduate. He resigned
his fellowship in 1669 and began to practice medicine
in York, where, in comparative isolation, he carried
out and published pioneer studies in several fields of
invertebrate zoology.
Lister's work on mollusks was at first confined to
natural history and taxonomy. The latter, although
conventionally artificial, attempted to be comprehensive;
his spider classification was, for its date,
masterly, and agrees remarkably well with a modern
system. Based ex moribus et vita and on a wide range
of characteristics, it includes, for example, exemplary
descriptions of the eye arrangement in each group.
He was aware of intraspecific variation and came close
to a biological definition of the species. Lister's
systematic attention to field observation is noteworthy;
some of his notes on courtship behavior and
on the early stages of some species have never been
repeated. This work was not appreciated fully at the
time, even by other zoologists; and Thomas Shadwell
clearly had Lister in mind when he created Sir Nicholas
Gimcrack.
This early enthusiasm is also seen in Lister's work
on the life histories of several parasites--gall wasps,
ichneumons, gut worms, and horsehair worms--which
had been used by others as evidence of spontaneous
generation. Lister was very close to giving a
complete account of the life histories of these animals,
but his enthusiasm declined about 1676. It revived in
the early 1680's, but in a different direction. In 1684,
after receiving an Oxford M.D.--largely because of
his donations to the Ashmolean Museum--he moved
to London. A fellow of the Royal Society since 1671,
he now regularly attended its meetings and was
vice-president from January 1685. Two years later,
however, he was involved in some personal controversy
at the Society and ceased attending. He became a
fellow of the College of Physicians in 1687.
Lister's work was now concentrated on mollusk
anatomy and taxonomy. His best-known work, the
Historia ... conchyliorum of 1685-1692, consists
entirely of engravings by his wife and daughter, with
no real text or even titles. Because of the popularity
of conchology, the work became well-known; but
the three illustrated anatomical supplements were of
greater scientific value. These were the first attempt
to cover the morphology of a whole invertebrate
group in detail. Each contained detailed descriptions
of a small number of types, with briefer notes on the
structure of a number of other species. Although not
of Swammerdam's standard, Lister's dissections were
reasonably competent. Not surprisingly, he had
difficulty with the complex mollusk reproductive
system, and he suffered from the contemporary
tendency to overanalogize; thus, he assumed that the
“gill” of a snail must receive blood directly from the
heart, as in the fish, and thus believed the blood to
circulate in what is in fact the wrong direction. On the
other hand, he used sound comparative methods to
show the true nature of the mollusk “liver.”
His concern with mollusk classification brought
Lister into the controversy on the nature of fossils.
Many ideas on the origin of these “shell stones” had
