Peter Artedi's “Manuscriptum ichthyologicum”, a source for Albertus Seba's Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio (1759)

Abstract

A mid-eighteenth-century copy of a manuscript containing taxonomic accounts of a collection of fishes from Ambon and Suriname, originally prepared by the Swedish naturalist Peter Artedi (1705−1735) for use in the third volume of Albertus Seba's Locupletissimus rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio (1759), is described. Unknown to historians of natural history prior to 1941 when it was briefly introduced by zoologist Daniel Merriman (1908–1984) of Yale University, the origin and circuitous history of ownership of the manuscript is traced from Amsterdam to its recently discovered presence in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The manuscript is important because it holds the only known evidence as to what part of the published accounts in the Thesaurus belongs to Artedi and what part was altered by subsequent editors. The manuscript contains a large number of errors – often misspellings and grammatical inconsistencies, which are probably the result of careless reading on the part of the copyist – but a close examination shows that the factual contents of Artedi's text were not changed. Although embellished in various ways, what we see today in Seba's account is a faithful interpretation of Artedi's contribution.