The 1600s pioneer who challenged earth's origins

Some 400 years ago natural philosopher and writer John Aubrey wrote a huge book about Wiltshire's natural history but the ideas it contained were so radical that it was not published in full at the time.

Historian Dr Louise Ryland-Epton has spent the past three years transcribing that book - The Natural History of Wiltshire - which was written in the 1600s and was only part published in the 1800s.

Ryland-Epton said it was "staggering" how much was left out of the Victorian edition. Her transcription is more than 400 pages - the 1800s version stands at about 100 pages.

Aubrey, who was also an early archaeologist, mathematician and founding member of the Royal Society, questioned the age of the earth in the book and wrote about environmental issues, lamenting deforestation and the impact it had on wildlife.

Wiltshire-born Aubrey wrote about the county's natural history for almost 40 years, the result of which was a huge volume of writing.

It is that 1600s volume, written in English, Latin and Greek, that Ryland-Epton has scoured during multiple visits to the Royal Society where it is kept.

"When it was finally published in 1847, its Victorian editor edited out most of the content," she said.

"What we have today, or what we've had before my version came out, is a very reduced and misleading idea of what the natural history actually was."

Ryland-Epton explained that a lot of Aubrey's theories go against what people might consider Wiltshire's natural history.

"The biblical timeframe didn't quite work for Aubrey," she said.

"He identified fossils as the petrified remains of once living creatures and these kind of ideas his Victorian editor was very uncomfortable with because - even several hundred years later - it was still very advanced stuff and people were uncomfortable with it."

However, she said Aubrey was not interested in hiding his feelings.

For Aubrey fossils being ancient creatures was a "given" but for others at the time "they would have understood them as kind of accidents of nature, something that just happened to look like a seashell", said Ryland-Epton.

However, this challenge of the biblical timeline was difficult and friends told him to "dump that section", she said.

Ryland-Epton said she believed this was the reason the work was never published in full.

"You couldn't say this stuff out loud," she said. "You couldn't do it because you'd never publish again."

Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published in 1859.

Ryland-Epton helped with an exhibition marking 400 years since Aubrey's birth which was hosted earlier this year by Chippenham Museum in Wiltshire and she launched the book there.

Head of the museum Melissa Barnett said many of Aubrey's ideas "were remarkably ahead of their time" and revealed "a curious and insightful mind with a deep appreciation of the natural world".

She described the publication of Ryland-Epton's book as a "significant achievement".

A lot of Aubrey's work was never published. There are other notebooks and writings kept in the Bodleian and Royal Society.

Only one of his works was published during his lifetime and four were published after, including one on megalithic monuments such as Avebury and Stonehenge.

Ryland-Epton was amazed at what was in the full Natural History of Wiltshire.

Aside from his views on earth's history, it also showed Aubrey to be concerned about environmental issues, lamenting the chopping down of trees and noticing how it led to declining numbers of red squirrels and pine martens.

He also wrote about people and diseases, documenting remedies at the time, like the use of crushed snail shells on gout.

Aubrey was also fascinated by the supernatural, documenting myths and legends and sometimes trying to find solutions to them.

One bone thought to be that of a giant he suggested could be from an elephant once brought into the country by the Romans.

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