Maltese naturalists of the
The flora and fauna of the Maltese islands were poorly documented prior to the 19th century. Apart from records by visiting naturalists such as the English botanist John Ray in 1664, the Sicilian Paolo Boccone in the late 17th century and the Swedish naturalist Pehr Forsskal in 1761, the only Maltese scholar to leave writings relating to the Maltese biota before 1800 was the traveller, poet, writer, doctor and naturalist Gian Francesco Buonamico, regarded as the father of Maltese botany.
In 1670, Buonamico wrote four works on Maltese wild plants, including what is now regarded as the first flora of the Maltese islands, entitled Brevis notitia, which listed 144 plants. Unfortunately, Buonamico’s works were never published and remain in manuscript form.
The 18th century saw a turning point in the study of plants and animals with the publication of Carl von Linné’s system of botanical and zoological classification and nomenclature.
Linnaeus (to use his Latinised surname) was a Swedish botanist who published a pamphlet in 1735 entitled Systemae Naturae, in which he explained his ideas of the natural classification of living organisms. He published revised and expanded editions over the years, and by 1768, what started as a 12-page pamphlet had grown into a threevolume work with a total of 2,440 pages.
His writings were to have a profound effect on the future of biological research, with workers like Lamarck, Cuvier and Fabricius enthusiastically observing, collecting and describing new species of plants and animals.
The first Maltese naturalist who emerged in the 19th century was Stefano Zerafa (aka Zerapha). He was born on October 9, 1791, in Għargħur, to Alessio Zerafa and Grazia née Grima. In his childhood, he showed early signs of scholarship and was sent to Valletta to further his studies. After graduating in medicine at the University of Malta, he was appointed professor of medical botany, hygiene and public health between 1829 and 1856, and professor of pathology between 1833 and 1856.
Apart from his medical practice, Zerafa was deeply interested in natural history and took charge of the transfer of the botanic garden from St Elmo Ditch to the Argotti in Floriana. He was primarily a botanist and, in 1827, he started working on a flora of the Maltese islands.
As was the custom in those days, the book was written in Latin; it was entitled Florae Melitensis Thesaurus sive Plantarum enumeratio. It comprised two volumes, the first of which was published in 1827, the second in 1831. The flora included 644 indigenous, ornamental and cultivated plants with descriptions, seasonal occurrence and references to other authors, a list of which was inserted in volume 1. He provided a Maltese name for many species.
Zerafa is associated with the discovery and first description of the national plant of Malta, the Maltese rock-centaury. However, this endemic plant was first collected at Wied Babu in 1825 by Zerafa’s medical colleague Agostino Naudi, who was also a keen collector of wild plants. Naudi passed it on to Zerafa, who named it Centaurea spathulate, and described it in the first volume of his flora.
Owing to the rules of botanical nomenclature, the scientific name was to change several times, the currently accepted name since the year 2000 being Cheirolophus crassifolius. Zerafa did not assign a Maltese name to the plant, which has since come to be known as Widnet il-baħar.
Zerafa and Agostino Naudi collaborated with the Italian Carmelite friar Carlo Giacinto in the latter’s publication of a list of 800 Maltese plants based largely on Naudi’s collection. In 1980, Sicilian botanist Salvatore Brullo described another endemic plant, a species of sea lavender, and named it Limonium zeraphae in honour of the Maltese botanist. Zerafa died on March 2, 1871.
Zerafa was followed in the chair of Natural History at the University of Malta by another medical doctor, Giovanni Carlo Grech Delicata (1811-1882), who also became director of the Argotti Botanic Gardens. He was mostly interested in local flora, and in 1853 published Flora Melitensis sistens stirpes phanerogamas in Melita,
dedicated to Zerafa, in which he listed 716 species of flowering plants.
Grech Delicata was also interested in entomology and in meteorology. He was the first to start measuring rainfall scientifically between 1839 and 1841, using a gauge at the Military Hospital, Valletta (formerly the Hospital of the Knights of St John). In 1856, he published a booklet entitled Della quantità d’acqua che cade annualmente in Malta.