Pennant belonged to a distinguished Welsh family, for many generations resident at Downing, Flintshire, where he was born. He received his early education at Wrexham, and afterwards entered the Queen's College, Oxford, but did not take a degree. At the age of twelve, he had been inspired with a passion for natural history through being presented with Francis Willughby's Ornithology; and a tour in Cornwall in 1746-1747 awakened his strong interest in minerals and fossils. In 1750, his account of an earthquake at Downing was inserted in the Philosophical Transactions, and in 1756 a paper on several coralloid bodies he had collected at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire.
In 1757, at the instance of Carolus Linnaeus, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Society of Sciences. In 1766 he published the first part of his British Zoology, a work meritorious rather as a laborious compilation than as an original contribution to science. During its progress he visited the continent and made the acquaintance of Buffon, Voltaire, Haller and Pallas.
In 1767 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1771 his Synopsis of Quadrupeds was published; it was later expanded into a History of Quadrupeds. At the end of the same year he published A Tour in Scotland in 1769, which proved remarkably popular and was followed in 1774 by an account of another journey in Scotland, in two volumes. These works have proved invaluable as preserving the record of important antiquarian relics which have now perished. In 1778 he brought out a similar Tour in Wales, which was followed by a Journey to Snowdon (part one in 1781; part two in 1783), afterwards forming the second volume of the Tour.
In 1782 he published a Journey from Chester to London. He brought out Arctic Zoology in 1785-1787. In 1790 appeared his Account of London, which went through a large number of editions, and three years later he published the autobiographical Literary Life of the late T. Pennant. In his later years he was engaged on a work entitled Outlines of the Globe, volumes one and two of which appeared in 1798, and volumes three and four, edited by his son David Pennant, in 1800. He was also the author of a number of minor works, some of which were published posthumously. He died at Downing.
His correspondence with Gilbert White was the basis for White's book The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.Reference