ABSTRACT
William Swainson was born in 1789, and was too young to have experienced that blissful dawn followed by horror as the Revolution failed to usher in a glorious day. Swainson wrote that science could be seen to be in decline if one found a denial of the 'greatest and most acknowledged truths by bold and specious reasoners. By 1831 Swainson was already a disappointed man: it is an irony that a lecture in memory of John Ramsbottom should be devoted to a man whose unattained ambition was a post at the British Museum. Swainson believed that zoology was at a stage where its general laws were only just emerging. Everywhere in nature he saw networks of relationships, of affinities and analogies. Swainson's annotations to the pattern plates are full of exhortations about getting colour and shadows right, about usually having a grey tint behind a bird, and sometimes about details of background.
