ABSTRACT
William Swainson was the pioneer in England of hand-coloured lithographed illustrations in natural history. Swainson was born in Liverpool in 1789; one of his Cabinet Cyclopedia volumes contains, after a section on stuffed animals, biographies of zoologists, Swainson's own entry being the longest. For Swainson, Galileo's dictum must be modified: "the book of nature is a book of symbols". Swainson's key terms were affinity and analogy. Affinity is really opposed to "kindred" and does not mean family resemblance, but a link through marriage – the union of opposites. Swainson was a good enough zoologist to recognise differences between ornamental and useful tails and more seriously to recognise gradations through a class. Swainson rated philosophical naturalists far above illustrators, and before simply saying that he should have known his place, the authors might reflect that there are ways in which he was a mirror of his age, and that audacity merits some respect.
